Hebrew Voices #189 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 1

Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #189 - The Cairo Genizah: Part 1, Nehemia sits down with the head of the Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge to learn about the most important cache of surviving Hebrew manuscripts after the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Genizah was a chamber in the Cairo synagogue where Jews placed old scrolls, books, and letters for 1,000 years. Learn the story of how this treasure trove was discovered and brought to England.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Hebrew Voices #189 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 1

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Dr. Ben Outhwaite: That’s why the Genizah is so important. Because, in addition to preserving some of the best copies and earliest copies of important Jewish texts, the main Jewish religious texts, and lost works and so on, it also preserves an amazing archive of everyday life, of a kind that’s not preserved in other archives.

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Nehemia: Shalom. This is Nehemia Gordon. Welcome to Hebrew Voices! I’m here today with Dr. Ben Outhwaite, who is the head of the Genizah Research Unit at the University of Cambridge. He got his PhD here at the University of Cambridge. Thank you for joining the program.

Ben: Thanks very much for having me.

Nehemia: So, let’s start with a really basic question. Let’s assume my audience knows nothing. What is the Genizah? And why is there a Genizah research unit? And why is it here at Cambridge?

Ben: Okay. Yeah. All good questions, actually. So, what is a genizah? A genizah is a… the usual words we use are like sacred storeroom. As you know, in Judaism there is a practice of “genizah-ing”, of putting away texts that are holy. That once you’ve finished with something that has God’s name in it, you shouldn’t leave it lying around… one, just because that’s not respectful, but two, you don’t want to leave things that are potentially holy to be misused, like old Torah scrolls, Bibles, prayer books, all that kind of stuff.

So, in Judaism, and you can see this in the Mishnah already, they developed a practice whereby you have to put these things away where they can be securely stored and won’t be misused, and they are treated respectfully. And the comparison is with a dead body. So, when someone has died, you don’t leave the body lying around. You bury it with due ceremony. And it’s the same with texts, that you practice a kind of holy hygiene and that you lock them away. Now, in England, and I think it possibly is still the practice, they will bury books with people. So, when they bury someone…

Nehemia: You mean the Jews will?

Ben: Yes. Jews will, yes.

Nehemia: Non-Jews don’t do that in England, do they?

Ben: No.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: They will put books in sometimes, into the graves as well, old books that they no longer have a need for, but which are hanging around in a synagogue to be disposed of according to the laws of genizah. And so, what the genizah is, and the Cairo Geniza is in particular, is the contents of the storeroom, the genizah storeroom of the what’s now known and has been since maybe, I don’t know, 16, maybe, probably later, 17th or 18th century, the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. Their storeroom, which was by all accounts quite enormous, a two-story storeroom, although accounts differ, filled up with the detritus of the medieval Jewish community over a period of nearly a thousand years as they followed this practice of “ganeezering” their old texts.

Nehemia: You say “ganeezering”. So, for the audience that doesn’t know any Hebrew, what is this word “ganaz”, “lignoz”, what does that mean?

Ben: So, the word geniza is a noun taken from a root which is originally Persian. You find it in the book of Esther.

Nehemia: Oh, really? Okay.

Ben: So, there’s lots of Persian in Esther, because it’s the story of, you know…

Nehemia: Okay. Ginzei hamelekh.

Ben: Yeah. And in that case, it means the treasury of the king.

Nehemia: Oh, wow. Okay.

Ben: And so, the word does mean to store away, like treasure. And it comes to be used in post-biblical Hebrew specifically for hiding away texts in two meanings, because you can find it used in two meanings. One is to hide away texts that you can no longer use because they are too old, too damaged, or perhaps the rite that is practiced in them is no longer the current one that you practice. But, since they are holy texts, you ganeezer them away, you put them in a genizah.

The other use of it is texts which are inherently holy because they’ve got the name of God in, but which are not to be used. And at certain times this has included things like the Book of Ben Sira or other texts that are regarded as not suitable for contemporary consumption, and so you should hide those away. But you can’t destroy them, you can’t burn them, you can’t rip them up, you can’t cast them to the four winds, as you can in some other religious… So, Islam, for instance, when they finished with a text, it’s acceptable, like even a Quran, to rip it up, to put it in running water.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Really!

Ben: Yeah, yeah. You have to dispose of it that way.

Nehemia: You’re telling me Muslims, when there’s a Quran manuscript… maybe not even a manuscript, is no longer in use, they rip it up?

Ben: It’s technically possible. It is technically allowed to do that. Now, obviously, if a non-Muslim does that, that’s a different matter.

Nehemia: Okay!

Ben: Because the intention is that you are stopping it from being misused. And we can kind of see that in the Genizah already because we have pages of the Quran, for instance, in the Genizah, which were perhaps used by Jews for magical purposes.

Nehemia: What does that mean? Tell me what that means.

Ben: Well, on the grounds that your own religion is sacred, but other people’s religions are sort of… they are your source of magic. So, the Toledot Yeshu, the story of Jesus. So, Jesus performs miracles and so on, so that…

Nehemia: This is the Jewish version…

Ben: The Jewish version of the story of Jesus. So, this is the polemic against Jesus written and circulated amongst medieval Jews. So, they don’t deny that Jesus performs miracles in it, but they say that he stole the ability to do it by stealing the magic or stealing the holy powers of the Temple from the rabbis, and that’s how he does it. So, basically, he’s taken Jewish religious power and turned it into magic. And so, the same idea is, if you were to leave… so in Judaism, if you were to leave pages of the Bible around, people might cut them up and use them as amulets, lucky amulets, and you can kind of see that because there was that guy who had a piece of the Aleppo Codex in America, wasn’t he?

Nehemia: He was a Syrian Jew who became a taxi driver in New York, and he had walked by the synagogue in Aleppo the day that the Aleppo Codex was supposedly destroyed and burned. And he saw two pieces on the ground, and he picked them up and he kept them in his wallet for decades. And when he died, his daughter turned them over to the… to Israel.

Ben: That’s right. So, that was a kind of lucky charm, you know?

Nehemia: But they would do that with the Quran, you’re saying? Jews would do that?

Ben: Well, we do have Quranic passages copied into Hebrew script.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: In the context of a book that also contains kind of charms for good luck in travel, for protection in travel and so on. So the suggestion is that the Quran here is being used specifically for kind of magical good luck purposes.

Nehemia: Hmm. Okay. All right, so we had three questions. One is what’s a genizah, what’s the Cairo Geniza? And how did it end up here at Cambridge?

Ben: So, a genizah is a storeroom where you put used or worn-out texts that you can’t leave lying around because, one, would be disrespectful to God’s name that’s in them, but also, they might be profaned by other people misusing them.

Nehemia: Talk for a minute about misusing them. So, you gave the example of… well, you said they rip it up in Islam in order to avoid the misuse. So, using it as an amulet is one type of misuse. What’s something else?

Ben: Well, even quite simple things, such as accidentally writing an obscene text over the top of it. Or it is quite… I think it’s an established fact that some old Roman papyri are used subsequently as toilet paper.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: That’s so interesting. I didn’t know that.

Ben: Yeah. You want to be careful when handling old manuscripts.

Nehemia: That’s interesting.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: That reminds me of the scholar who… or the archaeologist who discovered the toilet at Qumran. And he told me he walked around, he measured 2,000 cubits, and then he walked around the 2,000-cubit perimeter and just smelled until he found it. And after nearly 2,000 years it still stank. So, that’s interesting. And then when they did tests on the feces there, they found that it was endemic to have diarrhea, like… So, we used to think they were so clean because they went to a mikvah, they immersed in water every day. But if you’re using the same water for six months and you immerse every morning, that’s not going to be clean water. And so, people were dying in their 30’s because they constantly had diarrhea out in the desert, probably from the mikvahs. So, you’re saying you could be handling old manuscripts? I didn’t know this. And you could be touching feces…

Ben: Yeah, because they have done some tests on some Roman stuff from certain areas that has that…

Nehemia: Really? Oh, Roman stuff. So, I’ve smelled some Torah scrolls that had two distinct smells. One was the smell of death, and that ties into what a genizah is, and what you just said, that they bury it with a body. So, if they’re burying it in a cave, at some point maybe somebody went and pillaged that cave, but the death smell is still there. And the other is a very strong smell of perfume, which may also tie in, because that’s a practice in some Eastern Jewish communities, to throw a bottle of perfume into the grave so that the dead person… and I asked people, “Why do you do that?” And they say, “We don’t want our beloved father to have to smell the death.” Well, he’s dead, right? But maybe on some metaphorical level to… they don’t want it to stink.

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: So, I wondered if those Torah scrolls… Of course, it could have been that there was a genizah and a rat crawled in and died, and that’s why it smells of death. I don’t know, but I like my version better. It’s a good story.

Ben: And you can see this as well. So, in geniza one, right, so we have Qurans, now we have Quranic pages that are proper…

Nehemia: Intact?

Ben: Intact, and from a Muslim… almost certainly from a Muslim provenance, the written Arabic script, finely written… Why they end up in genizah we can’t be entirely sure… how they’ve ended up in a storeroom associated with Jewish objects. But the genizah has become contaminated over time with other things which we can get into.

Nehemia: Aren’t there love letters and things in the Genizah?

Ben: Yeah. There’s everything.

Nehemia: Right, so it’s not just things with God’s name.

Ben: No. So, we probably have to make a distinction between a genizah in theory and the practice that is proposed for it by the rabbis. And it’s not mentioned that often, but you can see, for instance, in the Mishnah… Mishnah Shabbat talks about… we often quote this bit from Mishnah Shabbat, where it says what you can do on Shabbat and what you should do, and it says, “kol kitvei kodesh matsilim otam mipnei hadleika”.

Nehemia: Translate that for the audience.

Ben: “All holy writings should be saved from fire.” So, it should be saved from destruction.

Nehemia: So, the background of that is that there’s two prohibitions in Rabbinical literature about Shabbat. One is you can’t start a fire, and the other is you can’t put out a fire. So, if you’re saving a holy book from the fire… if it was a secular book, that would be a violation of Shabbat. But a holy book, okay, you can save from fire.

Ben: And it’s kind of up there with the idea of saving lives on holy days, when you’re not supposed to do any work, but you’re allowed to jump in and save someone from a pit. And it’s the same… and so, they almost equate the idea of holy books, which they don’t define. So, they say kitvei kodesh, “holy writings.” They don’t actually say whether that’s because it’s got the Tetragrammaton in it, the shem hashem, or whether it’s a book because… there are books of the Bible without the shem hashem in it…

Nehemia: Like Esther, for example.

Ben: Like Esther. And probably at different times and by different communities the idea of kitvei kodesh has been taken in different ways. But anyway, it kind of equates that with saving human life. And so, the idea is that you should drop everything, and you should save holy writings. It does say, “bekhol lashon”, so whichever language they’re written in.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: And, it says, “bein she’korim ba’hem uvein she’einam korim ba’hem”.

Nehemia: Mmm.

Ben: So, whether you read them or not. So, the implication there is whether they’re holy to you or not. So, maybe they are a different branch of Judaism, or maybe even if they’re holy to Muslims or Christians, it’s still the Abrahamic God.

Nehemia: Okay. So, we have to unpack that, because another way of understanding whether you read them or not might be what exactly what we’re talking about; it’s so old you don’t read out of it anymore. So, whether it’s still in use or not still in use, that’s one possibility. And you’re saying the other possibility is, well, maybe it’s not your sacred text or your branch of Judaism. Let’s say something written by the Dead Sea Scroll community, the rabbis, we have the example of Ben Sira, which we’ll get to, I think. Well, it’s unclear whether they read from that or not. I guess they probably did. Okay. So… all right, interesting. So, you save them from the fire, and so how does that connect to a genizah?

Ben: And then it says, “and then you should subject them to the laws of genizah”. And…

Nehemia: Oh! Okay. Because they’ve been damaged by fire.

Ben: Yeah. And so, you should then put them away. And so that’s genizah in theory, but the Cairo Genizah in practice… so this chamber that was in the Ben Ezra Synagogue… and although we call it the Ben Ezra Synagogue, in the Middle Ages it had a completely different name. So, nowadays it is known as the Ben Ezra Synagogue, and it’s a tourist site in the oldest part of the city of Cairo…

Nehemia: So, people can go visit it today?

Ben: Yes. And in fact, it’s kind of on the… because for start, the Fortress of Babylon, the heart of Old Cairo, it’s actually the city…

Nehemia: You said the Fortress of Babylon?

Ben: The Fortress of Babylon. That’s sort of a walled city.

Nehemia: That’s called the Fortress of Babylon?

Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: I didn’t know that. But Babylon’s in Iraq, so why is it called the Fortress of Babylon?

Ben: The Persians are supposed to have… people who came from the East are supposed to have founded it.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: It’s a Roman city… So, the synagogue is in the heart of what’s known as al-Fustat. Al-Fustat was the first Islamic capital of Egypt. So, when the Muslims captured Egypt, they camped at Fustat, and they built their first sort of big city there, and that grew to be the capital. In the 10th century, when the Fatimids came… the Fatimid Empire expanded from North Africa, so, a Muslim empire, they conquered Egypt, which they had long wanted to do. And in the 960’s they conquered Egypt and they decided to found a new city celebrating that, and they founded Cairo, a little bit north of the old city. Now, as Cairo has expanded… of course, now it’s a huge megacity, it’s completely encompassed Fustat. But Fustat used to be a separate city.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And it used to be the most important administrative center in Egypt and was long after Cairo was founded. Cairo is where the caliph and then the sultan lived, and the army, and the Islamic administration and the emirs and the highest echelons of Islamic society lived. Whereas all the people associated with the previous regime, and with the administration of it under the previous Islamic regimes, lived in Fustat, and they were Christians and Jews for the most part. So, it’s a very Christian city.

Nehemia: Hmm.

Ben: There was a synagogue in al-Fustat, which nowadays is known as Ben Ezra, but in the Middle Ages was one of two Jewish synagogues within the walls of the old city of Fustat. The city of Fustat was there before the Muslims conquered it. It was a Roman town for a long time; it was a port city, because it sat right on the Nile, and you can see that there’s two big round towers at the entrance to Fustat that are now churches, or ones a church, and one’s a ruin. And the railway runs right in front of the old city of Fustat. Now, the railway actually follows the course of the Nile. So, the Nile used to run right in front of it, but because the Nile silts up and moves over time…

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: It’s actually moved away from Fustat. So, you don’t get the feeling that this was a maritime city, but it was really because it sat right on the Nile as a port. And between those two round towers was a canal that went to the Red Sea.

Nehemia: So, currently… and I’ve never been to that part of Egypt, so currently the Nile doesn’t run through…

Ben: No, it’s moved to the west.

Nehemia: Oh, that’s so interesting.

Ben: Yeah. It’s still within… you can probably stand in a tower and see it, but there is now a railway that follows the exact route that the Nile ran.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And there used to be a canal that ran through the middle of the city. So, it was a port city canal that connected the Nile with the Red Sea. So, a very important town in Egypt. And the Jews had two synagogues. The Jewish community of Fustat had two synagogues within those walls. So, as part of the oldest part, the synagogue of the Shami’im, so of the Syrians, the Palestinians, however you want to translate…

Nehemia: Levantines.

Ben: Al-Shams, the Levantines, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Al-Shams is Syria, Lebanon, Israel and the Palestinian territories and Jordan today, right?

Ben: Yes. When the Muslims took that part of the world, that was their administrative division; they created al-Sham. And it doesn’t fit with the modern geography of Syria and Palestine, so we say Syria-Palestine or something like that. But it was also known as the synagogue of the Jerusalemites. So, in Arabic this would be like Kanisa, which means synagogue in Arabic like Knesset. Kanisat ha’shami’in, or kanisat ha’yerushalmi’in. And then the other synagogue, which was built, it appears, right next to a Christian church, of which there are many in Fustat, known as the Hanging Church, was the synagogue of the Iraki’in, of the Iraqi Jews, so, the Babylonian Jews.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: Now, that synagogue, by all accounts, was originally a church that was purchased from the Christian community in the 9th century.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: Because the Iraqi Jews arrived later. The Palestinian Jews were already there; they were the largest congregation in Fustat, but many Iraqi Jews left the Abbasid Empire. They settled in North Africa, they followed in the footsteps of the Fatimids, and eventually they came to be the majority in Egypt, but not originally.

So, the oldest synagogue in Fustat, and perhaps one of the oldest synagogues in Egypt, is the Kanisat ha’shami’in, what became the Ben Ezra Synagogue. So, when we talk about the Cairo Genizah, we mean the storeroom of that synagogue in the oldest part of the capital city of Egypt. And unlike the normal principles of genizah, when this was opened up by Solomon Schechter… and perhaps I’ll say a bit more about how that happened, what he discovered, to his great surprise, was that it did not contain Torah scrolls, Siddurim, prayer books, copies of the Mishnah and Talmud, the holy sort of…

Nehemia: It didn’t only contain that.

Ben: No, it didn’t only contain that. It had those, but it also contained personal letters, philosophical writings, poetry in huge abundance, not just liturgical poetry, so religious poetry, but also secular poetry and bad poetry.

Nehemia: [Laughter]

Ben: You know, poetry about wine and love for boys. And the kind of thing that was in was in vogue.

Nehemia: Did you say love for boys?

Ben: That was. Yeah. I mean, so, love expressed in poetry could be towards romantic ideals of women or the idea that you find in Spanish Hebrew poetry, which as well comes from Arabic poetry, is the boy as an object of worship.

Nehemia: And this is men writing about…?

Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay, I learned something new.

Ben: It’s a kind of ideal love.

Nehemia: Okay, I’m just gonna ask, does that mean homosexual love?

Ben: Yeah. But it…

Nehemia: Or is it some kind of ideal of… I love my dog, right?

Ben: Yeah. It does, but it’s a kind of idealized love, you know, it’s a kind of pure love that… and whether or not it actually reflects practice is debatable.

Nehemia: Okay, wow.

Ben: Yeah, there’s a lot of poems about it.

Nehemia: So, that’s in the Genizah, even though that’s obviously… nobody even then would have considered that sacred. And is it there because it’s written in Hebrew letters and they just threw everything in there?

Ben: So, this is the big question, because when Schechter emptied out the storeroom, he said it was a battlefield of books, and he had these strange combinations of… you would have a pious, rationalistic text arguing against superstition and magic, and stuck to it was an amulet, which…

Nehemia: [Laughter] Well that’s why you needed the text against superstition, because there are amulets.

Ben: Yeah… sought angels’ power to protect you against bad luck or whatever it was. And we don’t know why this happened, but there are a number of things that are worth bearing in mind, and you have to adopt the medieval mindset. Because what we’re talking about is text that… so, this synagogue was active from the 10th century, maybe earlier, we don’t really know. The building itself dates from about 1040, but it was built on an earlier building that was destroyed by the Caliph al-Hakim, and they immediately rebuilt it when he died.

Nehemia: And did they take the contents? I guess this is the big question.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: Did they take the contents of the Genizah from the earlier synagogue into the 1040 synagogue?

Ben: We assume so.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: We assume so, because we have a lot of material that predates the 11th century. So, this synagogue was active from probably at least the 10th century all the way through to the 19th century, when Solomon Schechter, a scholar from Cambridge, arrived and emptied it out. And over the course of time, maybe originally, their intention was, “We’ll put Torah scrolls in here and we’ll put holy books associated specifically with this synagogue.” But over time, we got holy books from other congregations. There is material from the Iraqi congregation. There is material from the Karaite congregation. We have these strange survivals of Dead Sea sect works in there. But also, all of this, what we would regard as purely secular literature. And, in sort of the medieval mindset, of course, it’s very difficult to distinguish secular from religious because practically everything you write in the Middle Ages invokes God in some degree. So, if you write a letter to someone, whether it’s in Arabic or Hebrew or Aramaic, near the beginning you will say, “In the name of God.”

Nehemia: Mmm, okay.

Ben: Or you will say, “God bless you.” Whatever. We have letters where Sir Solomon Ben Judah, the head of the Jews in Jerusalem, falls out with an archrival who attempts to usurp his position as head of the Jews, and he describes him in one letter. He describes him as “the suspect”. He doesn’t want to name him because he so hates him. But he says, “God, kill him.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Ben: Yeah. “Yamito ha’el”. Yeah.

Nehemia: Wow. That’s literally a curse.

Ben: Yes.

Nehemia: But because he mentions God there… so that actually makes sense why that would show up there. But the love poetry, or… so, there’s a whole other genre which is like administrative texts of merchants and things like that, so there’s all these merchants’ letters. Like, there are entire archives of merchants. How did those end up in there? Why did they end up in there?

Ben: Well, again, even a bare bones kind of economic document, something that represents a financial transaction, will often invoke God. So, we have what are proto checks, we have these orders of payment that say… and we have them written by various different people, but we have a large number by one particular trader called Abu Zikri Cohen. So, he had an Arabic name. He’s a Jew living in an Arabic speaking land. So, he adopts an Arabic name, but his name is Judah.

So, Abu Zikri Cohen… and he writes these checks that are very similar to modern checks. They say, “pay to the bearer”. “May the banker”, and it names the banker, Abulkhair, “pay to the bearer the sum of two dinars” or whatever. And then it will also, on the note, write the number “2” as a numeral, so, like a modern-day check, like yesterday’s check. You write out the numbers in words and in numbers as a kind of security feature. It’s the same on these. But, at the top of it, it will have often a Bet, which is short for either… No, sorry. It often has a Bet, or sometimes you have a “be’emet” or something. So, it will have some kind of invocation of God. So, it will be “be’ezrat ha’el” or some kind of implying that God is guaranteeing this transaction.

Nehemia: Okay. Kind of like an American coin saying, “In God we trust”.

Ben: Yeah. Exactly, exactly.

Nehemia: In God we trust, but pay cash.

Ben: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No. Well, no…

Nehemia: It’s a bit ironic, right?

Ben: This is paper money, and what they’re paying is… basically it’s a promise to pay because of the difficulties of moving large amounts of gold and silver across borders, which was tricky. I mean, it’s tricky as a Jewish merchant carrying around large amounts of money when there were bandits everywhere. But also, it was a bit tricky for Jews rather than Muslims to move large amounts of money around under Muslim rule.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: But also, the distances involved. They were trading with India. You didn’t want to send vast amounts of cash.

Nehemia: So, you’re saying a merchant could take this promissory note or sort of check and bring it to India? And…

Ben: Yeah, there would be some Jewish banker there who would get… who would be able to…

Nehemia: Oh, that’s amazing.

Ben: Yeah. And these notes could then be traded.

Nehemia: And you mean literally India.

Ben: Yeah, yeah, literally. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the west coast of India. Jews settled there and had factories producing bronze and sending it back to Egypt. There was a whole Indian Ocean trade route in the 13th century. Most of our information comes out of the Genizah. But anyway, so getting ahead of myself a bit. So, you can’t write something without “In the name of God”. So, even a shopping list. So, we have a shopping list written by Judge Elijah, a judge from…

Nehemia: Wait, we literally have a shopping list?

Ben: Oh, we have loads of them. Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: That’s amazing!

Ben: So, we have a shopping list written by Judge Elijah, who was active in the 13th century in Egypt, and it says, at the top it says, “expenditure for”, and it’s in Arabic, in Hebrew script, because most Jews wrote their Arabic in Hebrew script. And it says, “expenditure for the festival of Shavuot”.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Ben: “If I live that long with the help of God.” And so, it’s in Arabic. So, the expenditure is nafaka or whatever, but at the end it’s “be’ezrat Shaddai”. So, “with the help of the Almighty”.

Nehemia: In Hebrew, not in Judeo-Arabic.

Ben: In Hebrew. It’s Hebrew words in a Judeo-Arabic sentence.

Nehemia: Okay, I see. So, it’s kind of like if you have a Hebrew word in Yiddish; is it Hebrew or is it Yiddish?

Ben: Yeah, exactly.

Nehemia: Okay, I see what you’re saying.

Ben: Yeah, yeah. And you can argue whether this is code switching or whether this is this…

Nehemia: So, how would you say, is that “be’ezrat”, “with the help of”, in Arabic? “Basa’ad” or something?

Ben: So… Yeah, something like that, I guess. And they would say “Allah”. They did say inshallah or something in Arabic. It would be quite common.

Nehemia: So, that’s a whole other maybe can of worms. But do they refer to God as Allah in this Judeo-Arabic? The Jews, refer to God as Allah?

Ben: When Maimonides, the greatest thinker of the Middle Ages, writes about God, he will often, in one of his philosophical contexts, he will call him Allah. When a teacher sends a note home for a schoolboy who’s being bullied at school, it’s in Judeo-Arabic, Arabic in Hebrew characters but it’s between two Jews, and he says, “God bless you” at the top of it, and that’s “Allah”.

Nehemia: And that’s an actual example of a letter sent home to a…

Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Oh, that’s really cool!

Ben: And so, it’s not only…

Nehemia: There were even bullies in the Middle Ages. I guess we knew that, but wow.

Ben: Oh, yeah, I know. It’s a fantastic little note. It’s just a little note that, that says, “Your son” basically, “the child has been getting on very well, in his reading,” or is it “writing”? I can’t remember. Anyway… and, unfortunately, another boy in the class conspired with the other kids to break his writing board. Because they don’t have tables. You sit on the floor.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And you have a board on your knees, and you use that to write on.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: And so, the other kids broke his writing board just to teach him not to shine in class, I guess.

Nehemia: Wow, man.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: Things haven’t changed!

Ben: I know.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: But that gets preserved in the Genizah, and that’s a little piece of really ephemeral writing, because that’s of interest to no one other than the boy and his guardian, right?

Nehemia: Well, today it’s got to be interesting to historians of what life was like in the Middle Ages.

Ben: Exactly. That’s why the Genizah is so important, because in addition to preserving some of the best copies and earliest copies of important Jewish texts, the main Jewish religious texts and lost works and so on, it also preserves an amazing archive of everyday life, of a kind that’s not preserved in other archives. Because nobody intended… these were not deliberately put for posterity, they just felt they couldn’t throw them away. Well, they had the name of God in them. They’re written in Hebrew characters, so even most of their Arabic writing is done in Hebrew characters, because Jews went to school to learn Hebrew. They didn’t learn Arabic at school; they spoke it at home. So, when they came to write as adults, even the greatest scholar of the Middle Ages, Moses Maimonides, the greatest Jewish scholar of the Middle Ages, writes his Arabic in Hebrew characters. So, it’s written in lashon hakodesh, it’s written in the holy language. So maybe if God has chosen to transmit the Bible to the Jews in the holy language, maybe I shouldn’t throw this piece of paper away that’s written in that sacred language…

Nehemia: I mean, technically it’s not the holy language, it’s the holy script. But…

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: I guess they were like… When I was a kid and we would study the Talmud, they would talk about reading the Hebrew. Well, now I know that most of what I was reading was Aramaic, but we didn’t make that subtle distinction because it was in Hebrew letters.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, that’s a similar sort of thing, what you’re saying.

Ben: Yeah. And so, they do refer to Judeo-Arabic, Arabic in Hebrew characters, they do refer to it as Arabic, but sometimes they have to be very clear and distinguish… do you mean Arabic in Arabic characters? So, he says, ktiva, to mean “the writing”, because sometimes we have one or two letters where they say things like, “I need to write to so and so, do you know, does he read Arabic?” And what he means is, does he read Arabic script? Because everyone can read Judeo-Arabic, because they can all read Hebrew and they can all speak Arabic.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: But not everyone can read Arabic script in the Jewish community.

Nehemia: Wow, that’s very cool.

Ben: That’s a skill by the kind of… your parents had to pay a bit extra to get you Arabic tuition for that, intending that you’ll go and work in the Islamic government or something. Anyway, so they keep it because it’s got the name of God on it. They keep it because it’s in Hebrew script. Maybe they keep it just because they don’t like to throw away anything written down, because the Jews are a highly literate society, far more literate than their neighbors, the Christians.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Ben: And so, perhaps that’s why they put things in… rather than let these things be wasted, they put them in the Genizah. But also, there is possibly just a sense of… what the Genizah is is lots and lots of different archives. So, at some point, like the great merchant Abu Zikri, say, he dies, and people clear out his house. And as a merchant he would also be a scholar, because he would have been educated to some degree. So, he would have copies of books of the Bible. He will have poetry to recite. He will have prayer books. He will have Mishnahs and Talmuds to study, and do they really want to sort through all that stuff, from his shopping lists and his personal letters and the doggerel he wrote about love or whatever? No, they may just take it all and deposit that in the synagogue. Or maybe it was the beadle of the synagogue whose job it was to sort it out. And maybe the beadle wasn’t the most educated member of the Jewish community, which is possibly quite likely, who knows? But anyway, for whatever reason, they put it all in the Genizah.

Nehemia: Mmm. Wow. So, all right. How many documents are in the Genizah, approximately?

Ben: So, in the Cambridge Collection that we have, we have 197,000 from what’s known as the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection, which is this collection brought back in 1897 by Solomon Schechter.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: Other people went to the same chamber before Schechter went. Some people went and took away large pieces. The community associated with that synagogue in Egypt were also taking stuff out and selling it, and that found its way to different libraries and museums.

Nehemia: You mean like in the late 1800’s they’re taking it out and selling it?

Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And that’s one of the reasons why Solomon Schechter went there. He found out about the Genizah because Cambridge was being offered manuscripts for sale from Jerusalem by a dealer in Jerusalem called Solomon Wertheimer. And he was offering various fragments of medieval manuscripts; pages of Bibles, bits of Mishnah, ketubot, marriage deeds, that kind of thing. And Schechter wasn’t that interested in it. But then, he met these… well, the story is long and involved, but he met two Scottish women who had travelled to the Middle East to go to Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai. They were great adventurers and explorers, and they went to old monasteries around the Mediterranean to recover texts of the Bible. They were Christians, very, very devout Christian Presbyterians, and their intention…

Nehemia: This is Lewis and Gibson?

Ben: Lewis and Gibson, exactly. Two immensely rich widows from Scotland, Irvine in Scotland. Raised Presbyterian, but they lived in Cambridge by just this bizarre combination of coincidences, all of the stars aligned and the whole Genizah story. They lived in Cambridge because one of them had married a Cambridge academic. Both of their husbands… they married late in life in their 40’s or something, and both their husbands were kind of weak Victorian men who died of Victorian illnesses running for trains.

Nehemia: What do you mean, running for trains?

Ben: He ran for a train and died on the train after sitting down.

Nehemia: Wow.

Ben: Yeah, it was too much strain on his Victorian heart.

Nehemia: Okay. Oh my gosh.

Ben: Yeah. And the other one died in bed after asking for flannel underwear.

Nehemia: What?

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: He died… wait, what?

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: I’m confused. Because he was cold? Or…

Ben: I don’t know, I don’t know, but his last words were apparently, “Please buy me some flannel underwear.”

Nehemia: Wow, okay. Maybe he was going into shock, and he was really cold or something. All right.

Ben: So, anyway, these two Scottish women who had married… one was a preacher, and the other was a librarian, their husbands, and so, they were associated with the university. But being women in Cambridge in the 1890’s, you couldn’t be employed by the university. They were very scholarly. They knew all sorts of languages, from Greek to Arabic, and they travelled. They were doing what was in vogue at the time, which was to go to monasteries and find old manuscripts, with a view of improving our knowledge of the original text of the Bible.

Nehemia: That’s how Codex Sinaiticus was found.

Ben: Exactly. They were following in the footsteps of people like Tischendorf…

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: … who had really kind of revolutionized the approach, that you have printed editions that we’ve been relying on for centuries. But how reliable are these? We should go and find the best, earliest reliable texts, the critical editions of the Bible is what we want to create. And so, they were doing that off their own back because they were immensely rich through some accident of fate. They had inherited a lot of money from a Canadian who had built railroads.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: Like, a Scot had gone out and founded railroads in Canada…

Nehemia: It’s like a theme in their lives, railroads, right? They’re killing husbands, giving them wealth.

Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. After their husbands died, they decided to travel to get over the grief, because they’d always been great travelers, and they went to Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, and they discovered what was then the earliest Aramaic copy of the New Testament.

Nehemia: Okay. Is that the… what is that called? That’s the old Syriac, I think, or something like that.

Ben: Yeah, I’m a little… that’s not my area. So… and how they got there, because obviously Tischendorf had been to Saint Catherine’s before, and he had left behind… well, they don’t like him in Saint Catherine’s because he took Codex Sinaiticus away and they never got it back. The two women, when they went, had a very different experience. Because one, they were kind of unthreatening because they were women; two, they spoke Greek, whereas Tischendorf had very bad Greek.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: They spoke Greek. They were able to communicate with the monk librarian in Greek.

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

Ben: Because scholars in those days didn’t speak the languages. They knew the written language, right? Not the sort of modern vulgar dialect that they speak. But they could speak Greek. And that’s how they’d managed to inveigle their way into all sorts of monasteries around the Mediterranean and made friends with the librarians.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: And in this case, the librarian, I think Galaction, his name was, showed… he opened up like the special, “This is where we keep the good stuff.”

Nehemia: Oh, okay!

Ben: That he hadn’t shown Tischendorf, and in it they found this Aramaic copy. Now, importantly as well, the other thing they did is, they photographed items in situ. They didn’t take them away. They were pioneers of academic photography of manuscripts, something that you…

Nehemia: …dabble in. Yeah, okay.

Ben: And so, they came back with a whole Cambridge expedition to photograph the manuscripts.

Nehemia: Oh, wow. At Saint Catherine’s…

Ben: At Saint Catherine’s.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: On the spot.

Nehemia: So, their goal wasn’t even the Cairo Genizah or Cairo.

Ben: No.

Nehemia: Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai!

Ben: And the Genizah was just a byproduct. Because whenever they passed through Suez or Cairo or any of those places, and they took a tour to Palestine. They used to go to the book dealers in the market and look at what they had, and they bought things, and in that way, they bought some manuscripts that had been only just stolen from Saint Catherine’s, and they were able to return them to the monastery.

Nehemia: Okay. Wow.

Ben: But also, they bought a whole bunch of Hebrew stuff. Now, they could read Hebrew. They brought it back to Cambridge, like scattered, individual leaves of Bibles and that kind of stuff. And they brought it back to Cambridge in 1896, and they were in their house; they built a massive baronial mansion in the middle of Cambridge, because they were so rich.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: And they were in their baronial mansion looking at these, and they realized they couldn’t understand what all of the pieces were. They could recognize some things, like Bibles and so on, because they knew the Bible. They could read Biblical Hebrew, but they couldn’t recognize other works. So, they called in Solomon Schechter. Now, Schechter was then teaching Rabbinics in Cambridge University. He was a Jew teaching in an Anglican organization Rabbinics to people intended mainly… I mean, up until then, Cambridge had been a factory for producing Anglican priests. It was modernizing a bit, but essentially the university was still kind of like an echo of the monasteries. That’s… his job was…

Nehemia: So, Solomon Schechter was a professor here at Cambridge, but he was teaching clergymen, Christian clergymen?

Ben: Yeah. Well, essentially, yes. People who were learning Hebrew were essentially learning it to enter…

Nehemia: Okay. And, and I’ll just make a little note here for American Jews. Every American Jew I’ve ever spoken to about Solomon Schechter, they’re like, “oh, I know the school.” Because there’s a chain of schools in the United States called Solomon Schechter.

Ben: Yeah, yeah. He is, I mean, he’s immensely famous in American Jewish circles, and utterly unknown in English circles.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: And yet his career began here. He was essentially placed in Cambridge University to improve Jewish learning in England. The Montefiore family in England had originally tried to bring over Jewish scholars, the finest Jewish scholars of Europe, to England to improve the intellectual standing of the Jews of England. They thought they needed one or two kind of “tent pole scholars”, like to bring up the whole…

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: They brought Solomon Schiller-Szinessy in, a Hungarian rabbi, and they put him in Cambridge to teach Hebrew. Up until then, Hebrew had been taught in Cambridge since the 16th century. Cambridge has had a professor of Hebrew since the 16th century. Why do we have a professor of Hebrew? Because Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife.

Nehemia: Okay! So, he’s like, “We better get back to the source so I can find a reason for this divorce.”

Ben: And he ran out of reasons in the New Testament, so he started looking for the Old Testament and the Talmud. So, the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud. And for that he needed specialists.

Nehemia: Okay. I didn’t know that. So, it was Henry VIII.

Ben: Henry VIII owned a whole copy of the Talmud because…

Nehemia: Really? Has that survived?

Ben: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, it was bought by… I think it was collected by… the Valmadonna guy. Can’t remember.

Nehemia: Yeah. Okay. Wow. Okay. Yeah.

Ben: So, anyway, Henry VIII created the Regius Professor of Hebrew here in the 16th century to interpret the Old Testament.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And the idea was really to interpret it in his favor, of his…

Nehemia: Well, you know the story of the Bologna Scroll? So, there was this meeting in 1530 between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, and one of the things they discussed was King Henry’s great problem, which was he wants a divorce. And the Holy Roman Emperor says, “Well, here in Bologna we have the original Pentateuch written by Ezra,” which is what they believed, it’s what they would tell visitors to this church in Bologna. “This isn’t just a Torah scroll; it’s the original one written by Ezra.” So, they open it up to see, does it have the verse that Henry is citing as his justification for the divorce? And today we have that scroll, and that verse has been erased.

Ben: Ah.

Nehemia: Which is really strange, because we have an account from 1531 which says they found the verse and decided, “We don’t care what the verse says, we do what the Pope says.”

Ben: Okay, okay. That’s interesting.

Nehemia: So, that’s interesting that ties into Cambridge… and wow! Everything ties together.

Ben: It’s also… I just point out that’s not the original scroll written by Ezra…

Nehemia: No, of course not.

Ben: Because that’s in the Ben Ezra Synagogue.

Nehemia: Oh. Okay.

Ben: So, that… until today, I think, tourists are told that scroll is in the synagogue.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: It was looked at by Adler, when Adler… he wrote his book… he traveled around Jewish communities of the Middle East, and he wrote his book about Jews in Many Lands. And he went to the synagogue, and he looked at the scroll and he said, “It’s like a 16th, 17th century one.”

Nehemia: Oh, wow. Okay, so, I don’t know about this scroll in the Ben Ezra Synagogue…

Ben: Yeah, I don’t know if it’s still there, but…

Nehemia: That’s really interesting. So, I just heard last week there’s a Torah scroll in Germany in a place called Kassel, and it has an inscription there, and I don’t remember if it’s Latin or German, and it says, that “this was written before the birth of Christ, although we’re not sure how many centuries.”

Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: And it’s like 14th century or something, right? That’s interesting; this is the kind of story that Jews would tell, or maybe Christians would tell as well, about these Torah scrolls. That’s really interesting.

Ben: Yeah. I mean, Torah scrolls are impressive objects, and so, when you see one, you sort of… I can imagine they accrue legends around.

Nehemia: Well, so the Karaites in Israel in one of the synagogues have a Torah scroll which they believed was an ancient Torah scroll, a thousand or more years old, I don’t remember the exact legend. And so, I got some photos of it and sent them to some people who know Torah scrolls, about dating them. I want to say it was like a 19th century Syrian scroll or something like that. But it’s a much better story to say it’s a thousand years old. And look, it was old, right, but 19th century isn’t really that old. That means it… this legend couldn’t be that old. This is a legend probably from the last generation or two. Or they’re like, “Oh, this is a really old scroll,” and then they project it back further in time. It shows you how quickly these legends can develop.

Ben: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you can see that. And maybe over time the scroll changes, and each time it gets a new… as they throw away the old scroll, this one is the new one, but this one is old.

Nehemia: Or “this is the old one we don’t use”, and then they start to spin stories about when it’s from…

Ben: Yeah. And obviously, I think… the Ezra Scroll in the Ezra Synagogue, Ben Ezra becomes associated with Ezra the Scribe.

Nehemia: Ezra the Scribe, okay, that makes sense.

Ben: But in fact, that name must have been given to it by some Ottoman guy who gave money to rebuild the synagogue, probably.

Nehemia: Somebody named Ezra.

Ben: Yeah, it’s probably some donor, some rich donor.

Nehemia: So, the theory with the Bologna Scroll is that when they gave this… because the Jews gave it to the Christians to actually the… or was it the French? No, the Dominicans, they gave it in 1304, in southern France. And the theory is that they explained… the Jews probably explained something like, “This is the original format that the Torah was written in by Ezra according to rules that Ezra established,” and then that kind of got misconstrued and misunderstood to, “This was the scroll that Ezra himself wrote.”

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Or maybe they just made it up. Who knows?

Ben: That’s it. That’s the problem. Yeah. And the name Ezra always gets sort of… over time, everyone always associates the name Ezra with the Ezra.

Nehemia: Well, in the Talmud, we have the Sifrei Ha’azara, the Temple Courtyard Manuscripts of the Torah, and that’s corrupted in some manuscripts to the Scrolls of Ezra.

Ben: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: As if Ezra himself wrote them.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. So, we had a teacher of Hebrew here, so Rabbinics.

Nehemia: What does that mean, Rabbinics, for the audience who may not know?

Ben: Well, this means teaching everything, you know, after the Hebrew Bible, really.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: The idea being that, so the Mishnah and so on, they are important for understanding the context in which Jesus arose. That’s it. So, it’s the Second Temple period, that kind of thing.

Nehemia: So, they had that concept even back then. Because I’ll often hear that this is something that was kind of revolutionized by David Flusser, that up until then Christians didn’t really look to the Mishnah and the Talmud to understand the life of Jesus…

Ben: Well…

Nehemia: But it sounds like they had some notion of this even back then.

Ben: Well, I think this possibly, what you really do see… So, these were lone Jewish scholars in a Christian university, right? Solomon Schiller-Szinessy, in those days… so his salary, I think, was paid by the Montefiore family, not by the university, but he taught here. And when Schiller-Szinessy died in, I think, 1890, Schechter took over, I think in 1890. I think his salary was also still mostly paid by the Montefiore family. So, they were kind of like, sort of… they did important work, but you get the feeling they weren’t exactly welcoming, Cambridge. It wasn’t like… they weren’t rolling out the red carpet for Jews in the University of Cambridge, which was still… I mean, it’s a conservative organization even today, but in those days, they’d only just relatively recently allowed fellows, teachers, in the university, to marry, because until that point they had to be bachelors.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. Like the old monastic principles.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And that had changed in the 19th century.

Nehemia: So, Henry can get a divorce, but the professors at Cambridge can’t get married.

Ben: No, no. Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: [Laughter]

Ben: No, no, not at all. Anyway, so Solomon Schiller-Szinessy, when he got the job here originally… Cambridge is sort of a democracy in that everyone has a vote in the Senate.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: All the permanent staff have a vote in the Senate. And the account of the vote for Schiller-Szinessy is that he was much opposed because he was a Jew.

Nehemia: Wow. Like, openly they didn’t have a problem saying that.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: It reminds me of… and I don’t know if this is apocryphal or not, but there’s a story about Benjamin Disraeli, who later became the prime minister. I think the first and only Jewish prime minister of the United Kingdom. I was going to say England, but I’m not sure that’s accurate. And so there was a debate in one of the House of Lords, or whatever it was, and… sorry, I’m American. I don’t know… one of the houses of your parliament, and they called him a barbaric Jew or something to that effect. And he responded famously, perhaps apocryphally, “When my ancestors ruled the world, your ancestors were running around painted blue.”

Ben: Yeah, yeah! So, yeah, it’s true.

Nehemia: And Disraeli was actually a Christian. He was a very devout evangelical Christian. He had converted, but still he was a barbaric Jew to his opponents.

Ben: Yeah. Yeah. He was also a great novelist. The idea of him being a barbarian…

Nehemia: Was he?

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: I didn’t know that.

Ben: I don’t know, possibly the only prime… No, no, there’s been other prime ministers who’ve written… oh, Boris Johnson. He wrote a novel.

Nehemia: Did he?

Ben: All right. Sorry. No. Anyway, let’s move on from that.

Nehemia: All right.

Ben: So, when Schiller-Szinessy started teaching here, he definitely brought a different side to the study of Hebrew. So, he exposed scholars who previously had studied Hebrew, essentially studying the Hebrew Bible, to the range of Jewish commentators on the Bible.

Nehemia: Mmm.

Ben: And you can see this by the time that Schechter is here, one of Schechter’s friends is Charles Taylor, who becomes the master of Saint John’s College. Cambridge is a collegiate university, lots of these old, again, kind of almost monastic houses, colleges.

Nehemia: So, unlike in the United States, here you have a university and there’s a bunch of colleges that make up the university.

Ben: That make up the university, yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: And each one of those is pretty much independent or autonomous.

Ben: Yeah, they’re all independent financial institutions. They’re all charities.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: They’ve all got their different customs. They’ve all got different ages. The oldest is Peterhouse, which dates back to 1284 or something like that. I don’t know. But a lot of the oldest colleges have been lost and amalgamated into new ones, because they were… that sort of religious orders are now disappeared and things…

Nehemia: And something that really surprised me is, you could be on staff here at the university, but you don’t have privileges at one of the particular colleges because you’re not a fellow of that college. Meaning, like, I encountered that with one of the people who works with you, that we tried to go to this particular library, and they said, “Oh, well, who are you? You’re not a fellow here at this…”

Ben: Yeah. So, Cambridge colleges are…

Nehemia: I’m like, what?

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: And I’m like, “Okay, I understand that for me.” And it was actually easier for me to get in than it was for her.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: Which, like, that’s crazy!

Ben: Yeah, yeah. Cambridge colleges are a bit… they’re very old fashioned. Not as bad as Oxford, but they’re very old fashioned. I mean, you’ve seen the college porters, the guys who control the access to and from; they often wear bowler hats.

Nehemia: Yeah, and they’re not actually porters; they don’t carry your bags for you.

Ben: Oh, God, no!

Nehemia: So, what does “porter” mean, then? Is that what it originally meant?

Ben: Yeah, a porter. I don’t know. No, porter is something to do with… isn’t it to do with doors?

Nehemia: I don’t know.

Ben: Isn’t it like guarding the door? Port?

Nehemia: From the port? That makes sense.

Ben: Yeah, I think so. But anyway, I’m…

Nehemia: So, whenever I’m here, I stay usually at one of what we call dormitories. What do you call it, accommodations or something? Like where the students sleep.

Ben: Yeah. College accommodation, college rooms.

Nehemia: College rooms, okay. I call them dormitories in America. And then you check in with the porters’ lodge.

Ben: Yes.

Nehemia: And you’re always constantly dealing with the porters’ lodge. Yeah, it’s very old fashioned. And they do wear the bowler hats, that’s right.

Ben: They do. And some of them are rude because that is the history of their position in that college. So, Trinity porters are famously very rude because they have always been rude. And so, every new Trinity porter who starts work there knows that he has to be rude.

Nehemia: So, I can say from my experience, I’ve never had a negative experience with them. They’ve always been very polite to me, but I never stayed at Trinity College, so I don’t know.

Ben: Yeah, and maybe it’s changing, but that used to be the Cambridge thing.

Nehemia: And maybe it’s the renting. So, what I do usually is I’ll go between terms when the students aren’t there, and so I can sleep in one of the dorms. They’re basically like a hotel, but it’s like four minutes from this library, so it’s amazing.

Ben: Yeah, fantastic.

Nehemia: But no, they’ve always been really polite to me, really nice to me. It is kind of strange; I’m a grown man sleeping in a dorm room, but it’s better than staying somewhere that’s 30 minutes away, so I appreciate it.

Ben: Yeah, okay. Well, my understanding is that… the scholar of Rabbinic texts, Jacob Neusner…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: A famously productive scholar, that he once came to give a lecture and he stayed in a college room. And I think I got this story from my predecessor, Stefan Reif, which means it must be true. Is that Neusner arrived, and the porter was rude to him, so he picked up his suitcase and left without ever giving the lecture.

Nehemia: Wow.

Ben: That sounds like a real… that sounds like a true Cambridge story to me.

Nehemia: Okay. All right, but I’m sure that was quite a few decades ago. And…

Ben: Yeah, that was some time ago.

Nehemia: And now you can do a bad review on universityrooms.com if they do that, so maybe they’re more careful.

Ben: Yeah, there you go. That’s right, that’s right. Yeah, no, TripAdvisor has probably changed everything.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, anyway, one of Schechter’s friends, he mentored in Jewish texts, following in the footsteps of Schiller-Szinessy. It was Charles Taylor who was master of Saint John’s College, became master of Saint John’s College. He was a mathematician.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm.

Ben: He wrote about maths, cones or something. He did… I don’t know. Anyway, but he was far more interested in God because he was a devout Christian like many of them in the university in those days. And he had taken instruction from Schiller-Szinessy and from Schechter, and he wrote a commentary on Pirkei Avot, on a tractate in the Mishnah.

Nehemia: Ethics of our Fathers, it’s usually called in American English.

Ben: And that commentary is surprising for the number of Jewish sources which it uses.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: Which would be unheard of for a Christian scholar to do that. But the fact is, he’d been exposed by Schiller-Szinessy and Schechter to all the Jewish sources, and that commentary, I think, is still regarded today as the best commentary on Pirkei Avot written by a Christian mathematician.

Nehemia: So, that’s really interesting… [Laughter] Well, how many have been written by Christian mathematicians, to be fair? So, it’s really interesting… so, you do have this phenomenon that some of these Christian Hebraists, they would open up some Jewish text, and it would be like they were discovering it for the first time, like no one had ever read it or commented on it. And here you’re saying he’s within this whole internal Jewish dialogue of, “What does this passage mean? And how do we understand it? And what are the parallels?” And he’s drawing on all that. That’s really interesting.

Ben: And if you look at the college libraries… So, we’re in the university library, which is the main library of the university and has an official role in our guarding the intellectual knowledge of the nation as well, because we’re a copyright library. You get we get a copy of every book published in the UK.

Nehemia: Wait, so there’s multiple libraries like that in the UK?

Ben: Yeah, it’s about…

Nehemia: Because in the US there’s only the Library of Congress.

Ben: No, no. So, there’s Edinburgh, there’s us, there’s Oxford and Dublin. So, it goes across to the former member of…

Nehemia: Dublin in Ireland. So, in the US you publish a book, and you have to send two copies to the Library of Congress. Israel has a very similar law. What’s the rule here in the UK? Do you send it to each of those libraries? Or do you send it to one of those libraries?

Ben: There is an office in London that in the old days, when it used to be physical copies, used to collect them, and then I think it was up to the libraries to put in a claim.

Ben: Oh, okay.

Ben: Never having dealt with that side of libraries, so I can’t be sure that what I’m saying is true at all. But now it’s electronic deposit.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Ben: So, many of them, we just get electronically.

Nehemia: Okay. As far as I know, if you print a book in the US today, you still have to send two copies to the Library of Congress. Now, whether they keep those or not, because they couldn’t possibly have enough room for every book that’s published. And maybe some people don’t do it, but big publishing houses definitely still do it.

Ben: Yeah, we do it. We do it, and the great thing is that we get books that are withdrawn subsequently.

Nehemia: Oh, really?

Ben: So, we have copies of books that are effectively forbidden…

Nehemia: Wow!

Ben: And we have to put them in a special collection which is known as the Ark Collection.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: So, things like the first edition of Ulysses and so on, that was banned for a while. A recent publication by the Museum of the Bible that was withdrawn by its publisher…

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: Has also now had to go into the Ark Collection.

Nehemia: So, is this accessible, things in the Ark Collection? or is it…

Ben: I’m not too sure how you get to see something. I think everyone thought that we had like this vast store of pornography because we get everything and we lock it away, when in actual fact, the books that we lock away are the ones that people steal or the ones that the publishers have withdrawn.

Nehemia: What do you mean they steal?

Ben: Some books are very popular to steal.

Nehemia: Oh, you mean readers might steal them?

Ben: Yes. Yeah, yeah. So, like, first edition Harry Potter is worth a lot of money.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And we’ve got first editions of every book, you know.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: And there’s… yeah, there’s all sorts of weird things that get stolen. We also have pornography locked away, because I found that the other day.

Nehemia: [Laughter] Really?

Ben: The other day somebody told me they found a bunch of publications by our unit, the Genizah unit, in the 1970’s. They published these big catalogues, and they found a whole store of them unsold downstairs. And I had to go and get a special key to access them, because they were right next to all the pornographic magazines.

Nehemia: [Laughter] That were also deposited as part of the copyright. That’s funny.

Ben: Yeah. And they’re locked away so librarians can’t go and have a look at them. You have to get a key from a supervisor.

Nehemia: Wow, that’s… in some ways that’s like very quaint because, like, I mean… yeah, that’s interesting. Okay, all right, let’s move on!

Ben: Anyway. So, Solomon Schechter…

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: You know, was the sort of pointy tip of Cambridge’s long interest in Jewish studies and in Hebrew in particular. But Cambridge did have a very long interest in Hebrew. We’ve had a professor of Hebrew since 16th century. We’ve been collecting Hebrew manuscripts since the 16th century, and every college library has a collection of Hebrew books, some of them very old, from the early days of printing, showing that the people who worked in Cambridge were engaging with Jewish scholarship, engaging with Jewish texts, engaging with Jewish ideas throughout. And much of this was the Reformation, the interest in Judaism and the Hebrew Bible at that stage, but all through up to the present day. But Schechter and Schiller-Szinessy, his predecessors, were new, because it wasn’t just Jewish books; these were actually Jews in the university who were teaching, which was very unusual.

Nehemia: And they were Jews who hadn’t converted to Christianity, who were still within the Jewish milieu.

Ben: Exactly. So, both of them were still very much in the Jewish milieu, especially… I mean, well, both of them, but especially Schechter, who went on to America to save Conservative Judaism in America, was his job.

Nehemia: So, just let’s sidetrack for a minute, which I love doing. So, you mentioned all these manuscripts that they’re collecting for centuries before Schiller-Szinessy and before Solomon Schechter. So, you have a cache of manuscripts here which were brought over from India by this priest named Buchanan, and they include things like a Torah scroll from India. They include a Hebrew translation of the New Testament, or let’s be more neutral, a Hebrew version of the New Testament, which presumably is a translation. I think we even today… well, there’s a theory today of who translated it. It was this Jewish convert to Christianity in the 17th century in Amsterdam who then went to India and worked among the Indian Jews, and he apparently is, according to some scholars, he’s the one who translated it. You have the words of Gad the Seer.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: Which is an incredible story in itself.

Ben: Yeah, yeah, a really odd manuscript that just pops up here and nowhere else. A unique text.

Nehemia: Yeah. Well, there’s a debate now in Israel between two scholars. One is the grandson of the founder of Bar-Ilan University, whose name is Meir Bar Ilan.

Ben: Meir Bar Ilan.

Nehemia: And he claims that’s a copy of an earlier work that was brought from Yemen, which goes back to the Second Temple period, and it was something like the Book of Jubilees, meaning it was one of these pseudepigraphal works, attributed to Gad the Seer. The other opinion, who is the critique… I forget his name, Hillel something, of Bar-Ilan, he says, “No, no, no. This was translated by the same guy who translated the New Testament, this 17th century Jew who converted to Christianity.” And he also apparently translated, this same 17th century Jewish convert to Christianity also translated the Quran into Hebrew, which is now in the Library of Congress. So, makes sense… and I’ve seen some of the evidence, like, it’s frankly really bad Hebrew, although really bad Hebrew could just be Hebrew from the Second Temple period that I’m not familiar with. Right?

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, how do you know, sometimes? But apparently, he’s also the one who translated the Quran and the New Testament and wrote the words of Gad the Seer. That’s the claim of the opponents of Bar Ilan.

Ben: Yeah. That’s right. Yeah. So, yeah, we got the Buchanan manuscripts just sort of by chance.

Nehemia: So, that’s amazing. So, what do you know about that that you can tell us? Like, what’s the back story? Because I don’t know… I just know Buchanan brought these manuscripts from India.

Ben: I don’t know enough about it. I know that they were already here when Schechter was here because Schechter…

Nehemia: Yeah, he was like 1802, Buchanan. He came back from India.

Ben: Yeah, he catalogued… Schechter catalogued them, and he was… Schechter was super skeptical about the claims for the antiquity of Gad the Seer and so on. He sees Kabbalah in some of the writing. He can see that it can’t be earlier than 16th century.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, for the Hebrew New Testament, from what I’ve looked at it, for example, in Acts chapter 2, where they talk about Shavuot, the word there is pentecosta. So, that would suggest it was translated from a European language, because otherwise, why not just say Shavuot?

Ben: No, it’s a good collection. We’ve got these copper plates as well that are…

Nehemia: Oh, tell us about the copper plates!

Ben: They are records of… they are sort of legal deeds of rights given to the Jews, and they are in sort of Malayalam and various…

Nehemia: Is that in India?

Ben: Yeah. The language.

Nehemia: Oh! The language, okay.

Ben: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but they have some Hebrew names on them…

Nehemia: Wait, and that’s part of the Buchanan Collection?

Ben: The Buchanan Collection, yeah.

Nehemia: Copper plates?

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: Wow.

Ben: The thing is, and these were originally in the synagogues and in the places he went to in India, but he made copies of them. So, these are copper plates produced by Indian artisans based on the original copper plates.

Nehemia: Okay, so these are made under the auspices of Buchanan.

Ben: Yeah, and I think people haven’t realized that. Some people thought he carried away the originals, but in fact, the originals, I think, have now been lost. But these are copies, and it’s just sort of odd…

Nehemia: And when are these from, do we know?

Ben: Some of the deeds are supposedly quite ancient, but I don’t know enough about them. And since these are copies of… they’re not entirely reliable, the copies, because they were hand produced in India in the 19th century.

Nehemia: Okay, so you know what this evokes for me? Wow, and this is the early… so, like, around 1802. I think he made several trips to India, because there are different dates on some of the different manuscripts, 1802 and a little bit later. But what this immediately makes me think about is the gold plates of the Book of Mormon, because I’ve studied quite a bit about Mormonism, and I don’t remember anybody ever mentioning this. It would be a beautiful parallel to bring. I once asked a scholar from BYU, “Why are Mormons so interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls?” And he said, “It makes…” and look, this was just his personal opinion, I guess. He said, “For me, it makes the story of the gold plates more plausible, because here you have ancient documents that have survived, and then you have, of course, we have the Copper Scroll.”

Ben: The Copper Scroll, yeah.

Nehemia: Which they love, because, okay, it’s written on metal, and it survived. It’s not gold. So, I thought that was really interesting when he explained that to me, and then I said to him, like, I mean, “Do you really believe that these gold plates were written by an ancient American Indian? And you don’t have them, you’ve never seen them?” He said, “Well, you’ve never seen the Ten Commandments and the original tablets.” I’m like, “Well, that’s a good point. Okay. But yeah, it’s an interesting point. Fair enough.”

Ben: Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Anyway, so wow. So, you have copies of copper plates from India. Tell us about what… we’re going to get back to Solomon Schechter, because that’s where we want to get to, but the Nash Papyrus, that’s also here, isn’t it?

Ben: Yeah, and that arrived probably… we got that at the beginning of the 20th century, I think. So 1902, ‘03, ’04, something like that. And so, it’s called the Nash Papyrus because it was the Reverend Nash who gave it to us…

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And he acquired it from a bookseller in Egypt, I think in the Faiyum in Egypt. So, down the Nile a bit. And it is a very small item. It’s a strip of papyrus about, I don’t know, six inches or less, maybe. And on it, in what we now regard as a Herodian style of script, it has the Shema and the Ten Commandments.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And when that was discovered, it was the earliest piece of the biblical text. It’s in an early hand from about the 2nd century BCE.

Nehemia: Wow, that’s amazing! So, that really… so, until the Dead Sea Scrolls, that was the oldest known…

Ben: Yeah, until 1947, that was the oldest piece of the biblical text that had been discovered. Now, since then, you’ve got the Dead Sea Scrolls, plus you’ve got the silver whatevers from…

Nehemia: Yeah, from Ketef Hinnom in Jerusalem, the Silver Scrolls.

Ben: Yeah, but this was… in character it’s very like the Dead Sea Scrolls, but it is not a Dead Sea Scroll. It was probably written in Egypt. It’s on papyrus…

Nehemia: And is it an amulet of some kind? Is it a mezuzah, tefillin? That’s what it sounds like.

Ben: No, nobody knows. Yeah, the size and shape of it suggests that it was of an amuletic property, so that it was to be rolled up and put in something, you know…

Nehemia: Right. Either for some kind of religious ritual, or maybe just for protection or…

Ben: Yeah, because these are sort of fundamental parts of the Jewish religion.

Nehemia: Right.

Ben: The Shema and the Ten Commandments.

Nehemia: Right.

Ben: What’s interesting about it, apart from that it is genuinely very old, and it was dated to the 2nd century BCE, I think by Albright or someone quite early on, or various people worked on it…

Nehemia: So, now you’re making me suspicious. I want to do carbon-14 on it.

Ben: It’s too small.

Nehemia: That’s a problem if it’s too small. Okay.

Ben: Yeah, we can’t afford to lose it. Plus, over the years, it’s been… it’s not been well-handled. It’s sort of been backed onto cardboard.

Nehemia: Oh, then you can’t…

Ben: Not by us. And then, it appears to be painted over with some kind of varnish, or something was put on it quite early on as well. Again, not by us. And it’s very fragile…

Nehemia: That’s probably because the ink was flaking, and that would protect the ink. But now you can’t really carbon-14 test it because you’re getting different layers of different material.

Ben: No. I don’t know. You’d have to strip the layers off and pull a bit out of the middle…

Nehemia: Yeah, we’re not going to do that, probably.

Ben: But the thing is, it was dated to the 2nd century BCE by the early scholars. So, Burkitt published it, various others worked on it… and there was some skepticism, but generally consensus was around 2nd to the 1st century CE. And then when the Dead Sea Scrolls came along, lo and behold, it is a pretty good match to the handwriting of that period, of the earlier scrolls.

Nehemia: So, you have some incredible treasures in this library, and we’re going to get to the most important treasure of all, which is the… well, maybe it’s not the most important treasure, but it’s the treasure that you’re focused on, which is the Cairo Genizah Collection. Arguably, it is the most important. I guess it depends what your perspective is. Like, some people might say Codex Bezae, which is also here. That’s one of the key manuscripts of the New Testament… is here in the library.

Ben: Yeah, one of the outliers, because it represents a slightly… considerable differences from the kind of received text.

Nehemia: But it’s one of like the five great uncials.

Ben: Yes. And it was deliberately… it was ganeezered in Cambridge. No, it’s absolutely true. So, Theodore Beza, who gave it to the university… I think we still have the… do we still have the letter that he sent with it? I think we do. He sent it to Cambridge. One, to sort of preserve it, but also two, to keep it out of the way so that people… because it was sufficiently divergent from the standard text of the New Testament that it’s…

Nehemia: Wow.

Ben: …better if, you know, people don’t look at it that much.

Nehemia: That’s interesting. So, I wonder to what extent that’s still the case. Meaning, the text of the New Testament in the Greek has, now… we have sort of a critical edition with Nestle-Aland, I think we’re at 28. So, I wonder how different it is today.

Ben: I think it’s less different today, and we can see where it fits into the different… like the Alexandrian stream and all that. We can see where it fits within those streams.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: It’s still a very precious manuscript, and it’s one that, again, we don’t show very often because it’s a beautiful manuscript with parchment so thin that it’s sort of translucent. But it’s very fragile. So, like the Nash Papyrus, we tend not to show that, although it is among our greatest treasures. So, yes. So, Cambridge has a pretty good record of biblical treasures. And also, we’ve got… so, in Jewish treasures. I mean, we’ve got a thousand Hebrew manuscripts of various kinds, codices, books…

Nehemia: Yeah, like one that is often like overlooked is Add. 1753… is one of the manuscripts that these great scholars of Masoretic studies, like Yeivin and Dotan…

Ben: Oh the… Yemenite one.

Nehemia: It’s a Yemenite one from the 16th century, but the claim is that it was copied either directly, or maybe several generations removed, from the Aleppo Codex, and it includes parts of the Aleppo Codex that are now missing.

Ben: Yes.

Nehemia: So, it’s one of the key manuscripts that when, like Breuer was comparing all the different manuscripts of the Tanakh, he considered this one of the key witnesses, like…

Ben: Yeah, yeah. I think that we should really digitize that manuscript. I don’t know why…

Nehemia: I photographed the whole thing, so I’m happy to share the images. But you can photograph it much better than I can with your sophisticated… well, really, it’s about the lighting, right? And you have to spend quite a bit of time to position it, but that absolutely needs to be digitized. It’s really an important manuscript.

Ben: Yeah, yeah. Yes, that’s true, and it’s a good example of how medieval manuscripts are important. It’s not just all about the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Dead Sea Scrolls will tell you a story about the Bible, but it’s actually… it’s a different story. It’s not the Urtext. You’re not searching for the best best edition of the final text for the Dead Sea Scrolls, because the Dead Sea Scrolls represent a text still in flux.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm. Well, in this case it’s a really late manuscript, but it may represent a textual tradition 700 years earlier.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: At least that’s what Breuer’s claim was. So, a lot of times we’ll say, “Oh, that’s a late manuscript. We can ignore that, it’s not important.” But sometimes the later texts preserve an earlier version of the text.

Ben: Yeah. And if we’ve decided the Aleppo Codex is the text that we want, then any witnesses to it are important because of the great loss that happened to the manuscript itself.

Nehemia: No, he was focusing on things like gayot, and that kind of obscure linguistic features. The problem with that is there was this claim by almost everybody who wrote a manuscript in Yemen that it was based on the Aleppo Codex. It’s kind of a formula that you spit out, because Maimonides gave the stamp to the Aleppo Codex.

Ben: That’s right, and they worshipped Maimonides…

Nehemia: And whatever Maimonides… well, he basically, as they saw it, at least, saved Yemenite Jewry from persecution.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, they became devotees of Maimonides, yeah. This has been an amazing conversation. Any last words you want to share about the Cairo Genizah, the future of the research…

Ben: Well, you know, the Cairo Genizah has been around a long time, 125 years in Cambridge. Genizah research, since the days especially of digitization, that’s the thing. And I know what a big fan you are of going around and photographing manuscripts, and in that you’re following in the footsteps of the Presbyterian sisters as well. And also, they’re the good ethical principles to that, so you’re not disturbing the original items, you’re not removing them from their rightful home. You’re just photographing and making them available.

Cambridge has always sought to make the collection available, because partly it’s aware of the fact that it’s slightly odd that the Cairo Genizah is here in Cambridge. Why isn’t it in Cairo? It’s just an accident of circumstances and fate that meant it got here. But had it not arrived here, would it be as important and well known as it is now? It’s unlikely, because it really did take someone like Solomon Schechter to show how important… If this had fallen into the hands of Neubauer in Oxford, it would probably still be moldering in a chest in Oxford, right? People wouldn’t have realized that.

So, the fact that it’s sat here for a long time, and it was neglected for many years, really, until the 1960’s, after Schechter’s time, and yet we’re still working on it. There’s still so much more to be done. And part of that is because it’s such a huge collection, but also the fashions, as I was saying, the fashions in scholarship changes. So, while you and I today are talking about the Bible, and I’ve always been very big about… because when I first took over the Genizah, no one was interested in the Bibles of the Cairo Genizah. Davis had done the catalogue, but even Yeivin is kind of sniffy about medieval Bibles that aren’t the Aleppo Codex and the big codices. He lumps all the Cairo Genizah fragments in his category of “most of them are too late to be interesting”. And by promoting the collection and having great scholars like Yosef Ofer come in and Mordechai Weintraub now, work that Kim Phillips has done, we can find Samuel Ben Jacob, the Scribe of Leningrad, in the Genizah. We can find the earliest Torah scrolls we have outside of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Cairo Genizah. And they’ve been under our noses this whole time!

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: It shows that it just takes a little bit of change in scholarly outlook, and we find all sorts of new stuff in the Genizah. So, it’s always going to be the collection that keeps on giving. Twenty years from now, we’re going to be looking for different things, and find all these things we never knew were there.

Nehemia: In 20 years from now, I’m going to be saying, I stared at that fragment and had no idea how important it was.

Ben: Yeah, exactly.

Nehemia: When somebody else discovers it’s important.

Ben: Exactly.

Nehemia: Thanks so much for joining us. This has been amazing conversation.

Ben: It’s a pleasure. Thank you very much.

Nehemia: Thank you.

You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

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VERSES MENTIONED
Esther 3:9; 4:7

BOOKS MENTIONED
Jews in many lands : Adler, Elkan Nathan, 1861-1946

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OTHER LINKS
Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit | Cambridge University Library
Jewish Quarterly Review
Full archive of JQR: The Jewish Quarterly Review on JSTOR
The Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society (Digitized Cairo Geniza)
Bar-Ilan Responsa Project - vast Jewish sourcesKtiv | Digitized Hebrew manuscripts (nli.org.il)

The post Hebrew Voices #189 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 1 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.