Hebrew Voices #172 – Chinese Jews of Cincinnati

Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #172, Chinese Jews of Cincinnati, Nehemia tours the library at Hebrew Union College with its librarian, David Gilner. They go into the vault to look at documents from the Jews of Kaifeng, China, fragments from the Cairo Genizah, and several other items.

I look forward to reading your comments!

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Transcript

Hebrew Voices #172 – Chinese Jews of Cincinnati

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

David: This is the only Chinese Hebrew manuscript from Imperial China.

Nehemia: Wow, okay. Is this a genealogy?

David: Close. It's a Yizkor book, and it goes back as many as 13 generations, in the case of the “I” clan. When they knew the name in Hebrew, they put it in Hebrew. If they only knew the Chinese, they went in in Chinese.

Nehemia: So, this is very interesting. So, explain what a Yizkor book is.

Nehemia: Tell us who you are.

David: I'm David Gilner, and I'm librarian of the Klau Library here in Cincinnati. And I'm director of the four-campus library system of Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion; libraries in New York, Los Angeles, Jerusalem, and the main scholarly library here in Cincinnati.

So, having been at the Hebrew University, you know how the collections can be divided on what's on Har HaTzofim and what's down at Givat Ram and so forth. So, here, rather than having to get on a bus, you only have to get on an elevator.

Nehemia: Unless it's in the Los Angeles campus, then you've got to fly. How does that work?

David: If there's a resource in Los Angeles or New York, or even Jerusalem, that's not here, then depending upon the urgency, we may scan it. And then you get almost instantaneous transmission. Or we can put it in an overnight envelope.

Nehemia: From Jerusalem? Good luck with that.

David: The situation in Jerusalem is, while there may be some resource in Jerusalem that we don't have here, considering Jerusalem has about 44,000 printed items…

Nehemia: And how many do you have here?

David: About 535,000.

Nehemia: So, you have more here.

David: So, you can see that… and in New York we have about 115,000.

Nehemia: So, what happens if it's the opposite, if somebody in Jerusalem needs a resource that’s not here? That's more likely, right?

David: Generally, it gets scanned, but the nature is this; that the collection in Jerusalem, besides being downtown Jerusalem's favorite public library…

Nehemia: We don't have public libraries in Israel, so...

David: Well, we do at Hebrew Union College, because pretty much anybody comes in; scholars, Yeshiva students, street people. They're all welcome.

Nehemia: Well, I don’t know about street people.

David: Well, they come in! So, the collections on each campus are geared towards the program of the campus. So, in Jerusalem we've got our students, first-year students in the rabbinic program, in the cantorial program, education programs, they're there. And we have the Israeli rabbinic program, which is a joint program with the Hebrew University. And we have the archaeology program.

So, what we have in that library is focused to support a program. Here, besides the rabbinic program, we have a PhD program. So, for example, all these books here date 1900 to 1966 on Ancient Near East, and they're basically a ready reference section for our Cuneiform Studies Room Collection because we have a lot of students studying Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite.

Nehemia: A lot. How many is a lot? I'm curious.

David: Ten or twelve?

Nehemia: That is a lot!

David: Yeah, it is, and so, what we try and do is support their needs. Otherwise, what you're looking at here, except for the section that has the doctoral dissertations and the rabbinic theses and such, what we have here is 100,000… I think the technical term in Judaica librarianship is sfarim. These are all “rabbinica”.

Nehemia: Wait, so that's 100,000 sfarim besides the doctor dissertations or...

David: Yeah, right. So, you can look here. You know, no surprise, the vast majority of these books are in Hebrew. Obviously, there are also books in English, German, French, Spanish, and Italian, and Hungarian, and whatever. So, this floor, which is the Library of Congress BM class, you know, is essentially supporting rabbinic studies of one sort or another. It could be Talmud, it could be Midrash, it could be Halacha, could be any of those things.

And on the next floor up we have collections focused on support of our Bible program and also Jewish history. The top floor is a certain amount of what we might call social studies, materials dealing with Israel, its economy, its people, etcetera and so forth. And literature, mostly in Hebrew but also Yiddish, English, et cetera.

Nehemia: So, if somebody wants to be a rabbi, they study in Jerusalem.

David: One year. If they want to be a Reform rabbi or and they're from America or the new world or wherever, then they would study one year in Jerusalem and then come back to the States for an additional four years' worth of studies. It's a five-year program.

Nehemia: Oh, wow. So, everybody studies in Israel for one year, and then four years…

David: Right. They form a chevreh. That's their class for the next 40 years of their professional career. And make sure that everybody has some… not just connection to the Land of Israel, but to each other. So, they know each other as they go through their rabbinic career, but also, we have people who are Israelis who are studying to be Reform rabbis…

Nehemia: And they study for five years there?

David: I think it's a five-year program. I know they go to get a master's degree at the Hebrew University.

Nehemia: And I've met, actually, at least one person who was doing that when I studied… I did Bible at the Hebrew University.

David: Yes, I noticed!

Nehemia: There was a woman in one of our classes, and I think she's a rabbi now at Kol Neshama in Baka, if I'm not mistaken. I forget her name. I’ve seen her at the synagogue.

David: But we have one woman working in the library who's a graduate student getting her PhD in Talmud, Tamar Duvdovani, who's working here in the library and, well, she just finished her comprehensive examination. So, she's writing her dissertation, and it's been really nice for the library because she's catalogued thousands of difficult-to-catalogue Hebrew works, liturgies, commentaries, things that everybody just put on the side, and waited for her to come!

Nehemia: That actually blows my mind that there are things… and I've dealt a lot with manuscripts. And I'll be looking in the catalog and it'll say something really vague, like "Jewish philosophical work". Which philosophical work? We say in Hebrew, lekh teda, go figure it out. Or "Jewish-Christian polemical work." Which one is it? Nobody necessarily knows. And it might be five different works. In a manuscript especially; maybe the guy who ordered that manuscript had an eclectic interest in different things, and he said to the scribe, "Give me five works on this sort of thing." And there might be five different books in one volume. It’s unbelievable that in the 21st century there are all these uncatalogued… we’re in the information age, but there's all this uncatalogued information that isn't digitized. That's amazing!

David: Well, even if it were digitized...

Nehemia: Yeah, I mean digitized like in Google Books where you can do a word search or something.

David: Well, in order to do that, because we're involved in doing things like that, we're looking to start a project to scan Hebrew and Yiddish newspapers for which there is optical character recognition of the Hebrew alphabet.

Nehemia: If they can read it.

David: Well, I think that the software that they have in Israel is very good. And if you've ever looked at hebrewmanuscripts.org, they've tried to do a certain amount of OCR on the manuscripts, but it's very, very hard. You would need hundreds and hundreds of exemplars, and then you would need a knowledgeable person to match them up. And even after you did that, you would need a rare individual who could actually read through it and identify it. It's very hard.

Nehemia: Well, yeah, that's another point, that you open up a book, and then the first 20 pages are missing and the last 50 pages. So what book is that? There's no title page and there's no colophon at the end.

David: One of our librarians, Dr. Jordan Finkin, is working on something right now where we have an early 16th century printed copy which consists of two leaves…

Nehemia: OK.

David: …from the center of the book. Now, fortunately, we have a copy of that work that's done 20 years later so we can match it up. But if we just had those two leaves, what could we know? It would really require…

Nehemia: You might know the general topic of what it's about.

David: Right. Recently he was looking through fragments; the parts that nobody wants to deal with, right? These little fragmentary pages. And he brought one to me and he said, “I think I've identified this.” And I said, "Yes?" And he says, “I think this comes from the Guadalajara Talmud,” which may be the rarest printed book. There may be 50 leaves known. I think there are 12 leaves at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America's Library.

Nehemia: And there's no complete copy anywhere.

David: Oh, no, no. Nothing like that.

Nehemia: What century is that from?

David: I think it dates from 1488 in Guadalajara, Spain. It's one of the Iberian Peninsula Hebrew incunabula that…

Nehemia: The incunabula is a book…

David: …book printed before 1501.

Nehemia: Wow… which are pretty rare.

David: They're pretty rare.

Nehemia: When was the Gutenberg Bible… the first printed?

David: Gutenberg Bible is dated to roughly 1455.

Nehemia: Okay, so this is roughly the first 50 years of printing. And there's a Talmud from Guadalajara and maybe 50 pages are left in the world, or 50 leaves, which is a hundred pages. Wow.

David: Right. And we went to reference books that have examples and we compared, and we found a snippet 3 inches by 1 inch.

Nehemia: Like the size of a credit card, basically.

David: Yes, which had Rashi's commentary on it.

Nehemia: Okay, which is on the side of the page of the Talmud.

David: Right. And then we pushed a little further and he found a snippet maybe 6 inches by 4 inches, and we could easily identify it as from Masechet Yoma, dealing with the Day of Atonement. And on one side was the Mishna, long Mishna, describing what went on, and on the flip side was the Gemara that commented on that. And then we kept looking and looking and looking, and we found an Israeli scholar who said, “…and Hebrew Union College has a leaf.” I didn’t even know that we had…

Nehemia: Wow, so someone had identified this…

David: Somebody had, beforehand, gone through and checked this out years and years ago, but the information had not been passed on because it's passed on, in that sense, orally. The previous director, who had been first librarian, and then director of all four libraries, Prof. Herbert Saffron, had been here for 50 years, didn't pass it on to me!

Nehemia: Wow.

David: I will show you a scroll downstairs that is a Samaritan Book of Deuteronomy. I knew of 60 Samaritan manuscripts that we had. And we've had them cataloged by Benjamin Tsedaka, of the Samaritan community.

Nehemia: I just did an interview with him in Israel, in Kiryat Luza.

David: Aha! Okay.

Nehemia: Or maybe that was his son by the same name. It might be. I think there's more than one person.

David: Well, he worked on the catalog for many years.

Nehemia: Okay.

David: And while we were moving in 2008, while we were moving rare books back here after a renovation project, I saw something that was wrapped in oak tag.

Nehemia: Wrapped in what?

David: In oak tag.

Nehemia: What's that?

David: The poster board that people use to make posters and to write on. It was wrapped in that, and I said, "Oh, that's terrible. That could be an acidic board." And I unrolled it, and I will show you what we found.

Nehemia: Okay.

David: A most amazing discovery. And so, you say, "But how do these things happen? How do you not know? How does something suddenly appear?" And yet hardly a year goes by when some musicologist working in Vienna doesn't open a box or an old book and out comes a sheaf of music lined staff paper and they look at it and they say, "Oh, this was done by Mozart!"

Nehemia: So, a lost of work of Mozart is found, and…

David: I mean, it may not be anything that's labeled significant, but it still, you know, was not otherwise known.

Nehemia: What excites me is that we're in 2016, and there's still room to find new stuff. New old stuff.

David: Just tell that to the discoverers of the texts in the Judean Desert.

Nehemia: Right! Well, I just read the other day that the Israel Antiquities Authority is going back to excavate caves. And this is nearly ten years after they said there's nothing left, and all the caves have been checked and there's nothing left to be found.

David: Well, that's the best time to go!

Nehemia: Right. Well, what was happening is, people were going to plunder the caves, basically antiquities thieves. And at some point, somebody said, "Look, we've got to get this before the antiquities thieves. Not to mention they're damaging and destroying stuff when they're plundering caves, and we can do it more systematically and carefully."

David: Yes. Here's something that you may never have seen. This is an Israelite Samaritan mezuzah. And rather than having a pre-assigned verse that they would use, or series of verses like Jews do, they pick what they consider to be a positive verse. This is interesting because, besides being written in Paleo Hebrew, it reveals one of the textual differences between the Samaritan version of the Torah and the Masoretic version of the Torah. In the Masoretic version of the Torah this verse would read "Adonai ish milchama, Adonai shmo." "God", or "The Lord is a warrior", "ish milchama", "His name is the Lord." However you wish to pronounce the Tetragram.

Nehemia: And for the listeners, it says here Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey in the Samaritan script twice. That's from Exodus 15.

David: Right. But the Samaritans throughout their Torah… well, let's say their view is that whoever the authors of the Masoretic text are has changed the Torah, and the people who cling tight to the Masoretic Text view them as having changed it.

Nehemia: Right.

David: So, in any case, their text reads "Adonai gibor be’Milchama, Adonai shmo", though they in fact pronounce the Tetragram just as Jews will say Hashem. They use the pronunciation Shema in Aramaic. It means the same thing. So, theirs reads "Adonai gibor be’Milchama", "God is a hero in battle, a mighty one in battle." And the Masoretic text critics see this as a later change made by a group that did not want to associate "ish", person, directly with the name of God.

Nehemia: So, ish literally means… it literally says, "Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey is a man of war" in the Masoretic text, and they changed it to "Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey is a mighty one in war". In other words, they didn't want God to be anthropomorphized as a man. Could this have been a response to early Christianity?

David: That's beyond me. I suspect that it's before that. I suspect. But the thing is this, the use of ish just throughout the Hebrew Bible doesn't necessarily stand alone. So, if you have a phrase ish levi, it doesn't mean “a man a Levite”, It means “a Levite”. Or ish cohen, a priest, or ish plus some other descriptor means a person, a man of that status and role. So, God here is being extolled as a warrior for what transpired at the Red Sea.

Nehemia: So, in other words, in the original context of Exodus 15, the Song of the Sea, it didn't necessarily mean God's a man, but somebody in a later period was afraid that it would be interpreted that way. And, so according to the Masoretic text people, the Samaritans changed it to say He's a warrior… takes out the word "man" for theological clarity.

David: Right. And that's not the only occurrence, but I cannot give you all the occurrences standing here on one foot.

I'm taking you now into our rare book, what we call “vault” area. What we have in here is about 15,000 printed books on the right, and all sorts of bins and boxes of other special collections: book plates, broadsides, scrolls, various and sundry illuminated items. And over here what we have is about 60 of some 70,000 books printed between 1650 and 1899. And then we also have about 2,500 manuscript codices and the collection…

Nehemia: That's in this inner vault, or that’s also here…

David: That's here. What we have here are compact shelving…

Nehemia: Okay, so I've got to describe this for the listeners. We’re in this… he calls it a vault. Why is this called the vault? Is it actually a vault? Is there a legitimate…

David: Wave at the camera!

Nehemia: We're on Candid Camera. Okay. And he's doing the thing where he's turning this handle to move the shelves like you see in archives. So, now you're opening up to the manuscripts to me. And is this a special like… special environment in here?

David: Yes. We keep the temperature at 63° ± 2° and the humidity at 40 to 50%.

Nehemia: And that's to preserve the books.

David: That's to preserve the books and I guess any librarian who happens to be…

Nehemia: I like it. It’s nice and cool.

David: And even though there is a sprinkler system… we decided that we would go with the sprinkler system rather than a gas system because it's possible in a room this size, if the gas went off, someone could not make it to the door. The gas isn't poisonous, but it displaces the oxygen, so we decided we'd go with a sprinkler system that has no water in it. There's no water in the system.

Nehemia: Wait, what comes out of the sprinkler system?

David: Water. But there's no water in it now so that there can't be an accident. Something has to set off one of the sensors. When the sensor is set off, just that pipe is filled with water. And then, at the second alert, just that sprinkler head, or heads, go off.

Nehemia: So, if I burn my toast, we won't lose hundreds of years of Jewish history here.

David: Thousands.

Nehemia: Thousands of years of Jewish history! Alright, let's talk about that. Show me what you got here.

David: So, right here, though we can look at some of these… for example, this mousy brown buckram bound collection is 59 of about 66 or 67 known manuscript codices from the Imperial Chinese Jewish community at Kaifeng.

Nehemia: Oh! This is the material from Kaifeng we're looking at here.

David: Yes, and we'll look at some more...

Nehemia: I'm excited about that because I lived in China for a year, and I went to visit the Jews of Kaifeng.

David: So, we'll talk about that. We'll look at that.

Nehemia: Wow. Okay, so Hebrew manuscripts from China. Yes.

David: Now, it's commonly accepted that Jews came to China about 1,000 years ago, or a little more. They were in trading companies with Muslims, and they sailed around to get to China. And then once they were there, they trekked back across the desert to get to Samarkand and Buchara.

Nehemia: Across the Silk Road.

David: The Silk Road. Now, in 1850 a group of Protestant missionaries sent a group of people to retrieve manuscripts from the Jewish community at Kaifeng. By this time, these people were not practicing Jews. They were practicing something, but their knowledge of Judaism was…

Nehemia: Well, I went to visit the Kaifeng Jews a few years ago, and they have an awareness that they're Jewish. They're learning Hebrew from Israelis that come over, but they don't have a vibrant community of…

David: Right. Religion, especially of the Western sort, has not been big in China for a while.

Nehemia: Although, for example, they don't eat pork.

David: They do live in a Muslim city.

Nehemia: That's true, but they're also surrounded by non-Muslims who eat pork.

David: Yes. But the Muslims and the Jews can lean on each other to support their ancient tradition of not eating pork in a pork eating country.

Nehemia: And their main street there is called Torah Teaching Lane, although they told me it was only renamed that in 1912 or something.

David: These books were eventually acquired by the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews.

Nehemia: Wow, okay. Why would they be interested in this? Who knows, right?

David: They took them to London. They were described in the London Jewish Chronicle in 1851. Some facsimile editions were published. One or two scholars had a chance to investigate them and to describe them and to publish about them. They were put on display in the London Palestine Exhibit of 1906, and then they were sold to the Hebrew Union College. At least 59 of the 63 were sold to us. They said that they'd lost four. A few years ago, they suddenly discovered those four and sold them. There were a few other manuscripts…

Nehemia: Did you guys buy them?

David: No, not at all. They didn’t add to what we already had. And we were collectively not happy with them because they should have given them to us, because we were quoted $5,000 for the whole collection. And when items went missing, when they were discovered, they should have come to us.

So, what we have are liturgical texts. We have Bible texts from the Five Books of Moses for the weekly parasha. What I have here is one of two Haggadot. So, we'll keep with the Haggadah. And it begins with the Kiddush.

Nehemia: And this is more or less the Haggadah that we know from other Jewish communities.

David: More or less from other Jewish communities living in the East, which have a little bit of difference in wording to traditions of the West. And there are also the peculiarities of being cut off for centuries and living in a non-Hebrew speaking community where you begin to pronounce things a little strange. But their directions are written in Judeo-Persian.

Nehemia: Oh, wow! And that tells you they came from Persia.

David: Because that was the trading language that the people used. So, this reads "Bekhilu yatzanu mimi…" And then somebody noticed, “You forgot the Tzadi in Mitzraim”! And then "halahma’aniya da’akhalu ava hatana be’ar'a bemitzraim".

Nehemia: Let me take a photo of that… So Judeo-Persian... Wow. That's very interesting.

David: Yes. So, this has actually been published in a scholarly edition, and in the Diskin Haggadah facsimile series, so, we can all find Chinese Haggadahs. And the one that I'm going to show you now is truly unique; unlike how "unique" is used in America, and it means special. This is the only Chinese Hebrew manuscript from Imperial China.

Nehemia: Oh. Okay. Is this a genealogy?

David: Close. It's a Yizkor book and it goes back as many as 13 generations. In the case of the “I” clan. When they knew the name in Hebrew, they put it in Hebrew. If they only knew the Chinese, it went in in Chinese.

Nehemia: So, this is very interesting. So, explain what a Yizkor book is.

David: It's a memorial book remembering one's ancestors, which is certainly important for both Jews and Chinese.

Nehemia: So, this is a Jewish tradition where you say a prayer for the dead person. And this goes back, you said 13 generations. For one family?

David: Right. From 1666, back 13 generations. And here's the Yizkor prayer, that they should be gathered up with the righteous and holy, with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Elijah, and Elisha. Underneath the tree of life, which they've spelled defectively. In the Garden of Eden… and also the women.

Nehemia: That’s funny! And the women's names aren't listed.

David: And now, what we have is an interesting phrase. "Nur ki bat Adam, Pnina ki bat Adam, Miriam ki bat Adam, and "bat Adam" means that they were Chinese women.

Nehemia: Oh! And they're called the daughters of Adam.

David: Right.

Nehemia: So, they're married Chinese women; interesting.

David: And sometimes instead of saying the name of the woman, it just reads "jin shea", a woman.

Nehemia: Oh, wow. You mean in Chinese.

David: And in Hebrew.

Nehemia: It says jin shea in Hebrew?

David: Yes. Jin shea bat Avraham.

Nehemia: Oh, wow, jin shea bat Avraham. That is cool. That is very interesting.

David: Or Lea ki bat Efraim. Jin shea bat so and so. Not necessarily a bat Adam, and ki bat Adam. And of course, there has to be a Yizkor prayer for the women. They too are in the Garden of Eden, I guess on the other side of a separate barrier, a mechitza. And here the tzadikim and hasidim are Sara, Rivka, Rachel, ve’Lea, and Moses’ three women relatives, Yocheved, Miriam, and Tzipora. And here they might manage to spell Haim with the Mem in Gan Eden, and then there is, of, course the pasuk that you have to tie the whole thing: "Just like melekh Shlomo said…" And then it goes through. And here someone writes "Hodu le’Adonai ki tov, ki le’olam," and someone says, “You forgot the Hasdo!” And they put it in the margin. "Kulhem bruhim, barukh Adonai le’olam amen ve’amen, hazak!" And then the end of the book.

Nehemia: Wow, that is cool. Alright.

David: One of the things I gave you was a facsimile of the four questions from this Haggadah.

Nehemia: Wait a minute! This is the material from the Cairo Geniza, in these cardboard boxes…

David: Well, what happens is… what does the box say on it?

Nehemia: It says "acid-free". It’s a special box.

David: It’s a special box!

Nehemia: So, this isn’t like a recycled cardboard box that you pulled out of the dumpster, it’s a special box.

David: It’s a special archival box. And in it we have archival envelopes, and each fragment is in its own envelope with some description. And it’s a small collection.

Nehemia: How many fragments from the Geniza do you have?

David: Only 150. Compared to, say a quarter of a million…

Nehemia: So, how did you get here? And this is one of things that really fascinated me. We're here in the heart of… and I hate to say it, the Rust Belt. But at one time this was the industrial center…

David: This was the Queen City of the West.

Nehemia: It was actually one of the industrial centers of the world, Cincinnati, Ohio. How did you get to have… first of all the flagship seminary of the Reform movement, Hebrew Union College, certainly in the New World, and fragments from the Cairo Geniza? How did those get to be here in Cincinnati?

David: Well, the library got to be here because it was a major Jewish community in the 1870’s. And Isaac Mayer Wise, who was a rabbi here, was also a leader of what was then effectively American Jewry.

Nehemia: So, this was a major center of American Jewry in the 1870’s.

David: Right. And he was very taken especially with the Classics Collection at the University of Cincinnati. And Cincinnati looked like a really good place to have the seminary; good community support, and he wanted his school to be close to a good research library. And so, he got a group of laypeople together in 1873 to form the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and got them to found the Hebrew Union College in 1875. The college started off in a building not far from the banks of the river. And because of that, each evening, the janitor took the library books and put them into two metal trunks to stop the wharf rats from gnawing on the leather bindings of the books!

Nehemia: How do you keep the wharf rats out of this room?

David: Well, we keep it far from the Ohio River, but...

Nehemia: Do you have issues with like bugs and things, and maggots?

David: We won't mention other people who have apparently had such problems in the past.

Nehemia: I've been to libraries where I opened up a book and I could see the trail of the maggots eating through the leather. I've seen that.

David: Well, you can see that in some of these books, because until they came to be in this sort of controlled environment, that could be their fate. And sometimes the fate can be worse, as I'll show you in that Samaritan scroll. So, what we have here are manuscripts. All of these are manuscripts.

Nehemia: All of these are manuscripts. Okay.

David: All of these are manuscripts. In fact, some of these are the only known copies of some manuscripts. This is a manuscript copy of Commentary by Emmanuel of Rome on Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and Song of Songs, and I can't remember which of them… If I opened it up, it might say which is unique. It’s maybe the only known copy in the world.

Nehemia: Oh, of one of those commentaries. Okay. I just want to describe here for the audience who's listening. We have a book here and the cover of the book looks like a modern cover; that's not the original cover of the book.

David: No.

Nehemia: But we open it up and it's written… is this written on vellum or parchment? It's been rebound.

David: Oh yes, it has been rebound.

Nehemia: And it's in incredible condition, I have to say.

David: Yes, it's a beautiful…

Nehemia: What year was this manuscript written, approximately?

David: I'll have to look.

Nehemia: So, there's a little card here that has information on it.

David: It's dated to have been done in Rome in 1401. I would assume there's some sort of colophon.

Nehemia: The only known copy of Emmanuel's Unpublished Commentary on Ecclesiastes and contains a complete copy of partially published commentary on Song of Songs. So, if you're a Jewish doctoral student out there, or a Hebrew doctoral student who wants to publish something that’s never been published, maybe they'll let you publish it. I don't know. Would you guys let somebody publish this unpublished document?

David: If they knew what they were doing.

Nehemia: Alright, very cool.

David: Now, you might say, “Now how did you get such a thing?”

Nehemia: Yeah, how did you get this manuscript? You're not in Italy. How does a manuscript get from Italy to Cincinnati? That's the fascinating thing!

David: Prof. Zafran was walking along the banks of the Siene in Paris, where they have the sellers of used books in those carts and display areas. And he was casually walking through, and casually picked up a manuscript, and casually looked through it, and casually put it down. And the bookseller says, “Oh, you interested?” And he says, “Well, it's nice, but… how much do you want?” And the person quoted a number, and he said, “Well, I'll think about it.” And he went back to his hotel room. I'm sure had a glass of sparkling water and said, “I can't believe what I just found!” But he was afraid that if he showed any excitement, the price would go up 10 or 100 times.

Nehemia: Because the bookseller didn't realize what he had.

David: No. So, the next day he went back before going to the airport, and bought, I think another book from the bookseller, and then said, "You know, I've been thinking, and it's not such an unreasonable price that you asked," and bought this from the bookseller.

Nehemia: This manuscript that's only known in this one copy of one of these commentaries from 1401.

David: So, given that he was in Paris, we can say he had a sangfroid, a cold-bloodedness that I could never have had.

Nehemia: He was a master negotiator, apparently.

David: He certainly was! A talent I do not have. So, that's why our library of this material was built up in the teens and 20’s by…

Nehemia: Of the 1900’s, the 20th century.

David: By Doctor Adolph Oko, who acquired most of these works.

Nehemia: And just for the listeners who might be surprised that the guy’s name was Adolf, that was a Jewish name back then, right?

David: It was a good German name, and Jews had it.

Nehemia: I don't think there's any Jews today with that name, but okay.

David: No, not too many Jews. But Oko was a great librarian, and he was a colleague of Dr. Alexander Marx of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and oftentimes they would end up splitting collections. They’d find a collection, and they didn’t want to outbid each other so Oko took some, Marx took some. Sometimes they did get into bidding wars.

Nehemia: So, some of them are in New York now. Do you ever have a situation where half a page is in New York and half a page is here in Cincinnati?

David: In terms of pages, no. But there are printed works that are known, for example, to be in three volumes, say a liturgy for Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot, where the Passover is in Cincinnati, the Shavuot is in New York, and I think the Sukkot is in Budapest. I remember many years ago these three volumes came together at a Judaica show at the New York Public Library.

Nehemia: That's very cool. I know, like for example in the Geniza, there's a website where they have a puzzle feature, where you can take fragments and try to fit them together. And people have found fragments in Cambridge that fit to a fragment in New York, and…

David: Oh yes. We like to call this “Where's Waldo?”

Nehemia: “Where's Waldo?” Okay, but it's amazing because they're literally fitting together pieces that were obviously at one time together and ended up in different libraries. So how did you guys get the Geniza fragments here in Cincinnati?

David: We don't have an official story.

Nehemia: Okay, interesting. Solomon Schechter discovered the Cairo Geniza.

David: Well, no. Actually, two British gentleladies discovered the Cairo Geniza.

Nehemia: So, he pillaged the Cairo Geniza. Or purchased things from the Cairo Geniza.

David: No comment. The same way that the London missionaries "purchased" things from the Kaifeng Synagogue…

Nehemia: Okay. Or, for example, today we have manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls which begin with the designation XQ, which means we don't know what cave they came from from Qumran, and we're not admitting they came from Qumran. So, there’s no official story of how you got the Geniza manuscripts.

David: No, there's no official story.

Nehemia: When do they first appear in the library, as far as you know?

David: In the 1930’s.

Nehemia: In the 1930’s, okay. So, I can use my imagination.

David: And all scholarly libraries are filled with material for which there is no official story. We can only guess.

Nehemia: Well, and we can use our imagination of things that were going on in Europe in the 1930’s, that might have helped them get here. We don't know.

David: Right. And when we do know, sometimes, we don't talk about such things, because…

Nehemia: One of the really tragic things that I learned about in my studies is the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau, which at one time was the center of academic Jewish learning in the world, and it was burned on Kristallnacht. And we have hundreds of manuscripts that survived that are in Jerusalem now, but maybe thousands were lost. We don't know.

David: Well, it's a very sad thing and it's… We were very fortunate, maybe the world was very fortunate. When Rabbi Wise started Hebrew Union College, the chancellor in Breslau decided that he would help out this new spark of Torah in the New World and sent all sorts of off prints and publications from Breslau to Cincinnati. And now, when you look in the German national bibliography, or online catalogs, and you find works that were listed but were destroyed during the war, one way or the other, oftentimes where you can find them is right where we stand.

Nehemia: Right here in Cincinnati in this vault.

David: Yes.

Nehemia: Wow! That's incredible. That's absolutely amazing.

David: So, it was farsighted.

Nehemia: I just have to stop here. So, the Talmud Steinsaltz Edition… my brother-in-law Rafael Freeman, who also is in an episode of Hebrew Voices, “Adventures in Hebrew Typesetting,” he is the typesetter here. I don't know if his name appears as the typesetter, but… he's not listed here.

David: It's all editors, but we all know the value of the typesetter.

Nehemia: Yeah. Alright.

David: Because in the most famous Vilna Rom edition there are all sorts of little typesetting mistakes, and therefore all sorts of novelai hidushim, brilliant commentaries that are based on nothing but on the printer's miss-setting of a letter of type. If they go back to the Bomberg Edition, you find what it should have said.

Nehemia: And look, you could say today in the digital age it isn't important, but it's just as important. You could have typesetting mistakes today as well. It happens.

David: And it's only 10 years old.

Third speaker: That's why I remembered something about…

David: Well, that's okay. So, actually, with the Geniza fragments, they were apparently acquired in 1928. Apparently…

[Third speaker]: Some of them.

David: That's what we think. What happens is, you're coming provoked us to bother to check the records of the Geniza fragments, which I did not know when they came.

[Third speaker]: Yeah, and this was in the file, and then this…

Nehemia: Wait, so here is a handwritten document that…

David: Well, of course a handwritten document!

Nehemia: Well, okay. And here's the printed e-mail. And so, what does it say here?

David: Something identified as the Blue Geniza Fragments, the Blau Geniza Fragments, we think acquired in 1928. They were originally numbered 1085 to 1089, but now they're numbered 1127 to 1310…

[Third speaker]: And some of them have ACC numbers.

David: What happens is, generations of librarians and others like to come in and renumber things, so that the rest of us hardly know what's going on.

[Third speaker]: And create a headache…

Nehemia: That's funny. I was looking at a Geniza fragment recently. It was referenced in a book, and I wanted to look it up. And I ended up writing to Cambridge and they said, “Oh, that's really this other designation.” I said, “For future reference, how would I know that?” And they said, “Oh, no, you couldn't know that."

David: The Cambridge Geniza fragment published volumes have lists of those.

Nehemia: Right, so he ended up sending me a PDF where you could look these things up.

David: Was that Stephen Reiff?

Nehemia: I don't remember. It was whoever answers the emails at the Cambridge website.

David: No, probably not Prof. Reiff. So, I know it sounds like we should know all of these things, but in truth, we all come on the scene, and we rely on the type of thing that I sent you, a previously published description. And then there were things that we were not allowed to talk about. So, for example, if you would have asked the Hebrew Union College Library between 1970 and 1992, whether what you're looking at existed, the answer would have been given in the voice of Sergeant Schultz from… remember Sergeant Schultz on Hogans Heroes?

Nehemia: Oh, I think that's before my time. What did he say?

David: “I know nothing! Nothing!” We knew nothing about these, that were in a wooden box, with each one of them in a glassine envelope.

Nehemia: And what are they?

David: What these are, are 1,400 photographic plates of the Dead Sea Scrolls. A safety copy. An insurance copy. One here and one at Oxford. But to be denied, in case some fearful day happened, and the Shrine of the Book was destroyed.

And eventually, in the 1980’s on this 132-column computer paper that we don't see anymore, came an inventory of what we had and what we didn't have.

Nehemia: So, these are photographs... these are the photographs that were published… what was it, '92?

David: There were published in '93, first by Hershel Shanks, and then eventually by the actual people connected with the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Nehemia: And if I remember, what they did is there was another copy of these that they got hold of from a library in California.

David: Yes, a microfilm copy, but that was a later copy. That was the copy prepared by Mrs. Bechtel, I think in 1981. And so, these show the state of the fragments in 1970. So someday, some scholars are going to do what you described earlier, doing with the Geniza fragments. They’re going to say, “Wait a second! Wasn’t there an older attempt to order these? Let’s go back to the earliest…” Because in some of these cases, between 1970 and 1981 fragments were moved around.

Nehemia: Not just moved around, they blackened, and they deteriorated. Have these been published? These photographs? Or can you not answer that question?

David: What has been published has been published by the official people in charge of publishing. These stay here as an archival record. They're open to be consulted by people.

Nehemia: Wait a minute. Hold on a second. So, you have photos… are these negatives?

David: They’re negatives.

Nehemia: Those are 1,400 photographic negatives of the Dead Sea Scrolls made in 1970 from the scrolls themselves, I’m assuming. At that time, they were probably in the Rockefeller Museum, is my guess.

David: They still were.

Nehemia: I think until the 90’s that most of them were there. So, these are original photographic negatives that exist in one other place as a backup.

David: No. Probably the backup copies are here, and I hear also at Oxford. And there were copies that were circulated amongst the scholars who were working on it.

Nehemia: So, where are the originals?

David: And I'm sure that Prof. Strugnell had copies since he was busy working.

Nehemia: But you guys haven't published these, that you can tell me.

David: We assume that they're otherwise published in Dead Sea Scroll publications since all the scrolls have been published.

Nehemia: And I know that, but the scrolls being published, and these specific photographs being published aren't necessarily the same thing. In other words, there might be a certain scroll that was published in 1991, based off of a photograph that was made in '91.

David: Actually, my belief is that the scrolls were done off of older photographs.

Nehemia: In other words, there was a set of photographs made in the 50’s…

David: And then later.

Nehemia: Right. If you go online right now, you can see the photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls from the 50’s from… Okay… what?

David: But we denied having them because we were told to deny having them.

Nehemia: So, now you admit you have them!

David: Well, that's because here are those scrolls published by IDC in microfiche, and here's the companion volume to that edition.

Nehemia: So, this is off the microfiche.

David: It’s edited by Emmanuel Tov. It's got all that necessary information. And this is the unpublished concordance to the Dead Sea Scrolls that was done in the 50’s.

Nehemia: Okay! So, I remember this controversy in the early 90’s…

David: You got it…

Nehemia: …where there was a concordance that certain scholars were allowed to have access to…

David: Preliminary concordance.

Nehemia: …but they weren't being published. And the question was, if there's a concordance that means you could put together, certainly a preliminary edition, and now all the scrolls have been officially published.

David: And this was the preliminary edition, done from this with a computer by Prof. Bentzion Wacholder, and his then graduate assistant, now Prof. Marty Abegg.

Nehemia: Okay, and this was essentially a pirate edition, is that right? Or, you're not saying anything about that. Okay. And those blue books; do you have the blue books where he published the photographs? Abegg’s photographs?

David: Those were initially published by what's-his-name, from the…

Nehemia: Wasn’t it Martin Abegg and someone else?

David: Yeah, but Abegg didn't publish photographs to begin with… Shanks.

Nehemia: Oh, and Hershel Shanks. And Shanks got sued by Elisha Qimron.

David: By Elisha Qimron, for publishing the Miqsat Ma’asei HaTorah.

Nehemia: Which one day I’ll do an episode on; it's a fascinating story. So, hold on a second. Help me out here! So, you've got those photographs over there. You have photographic negatives. Those negatives themselves, as far as you know… I don't mean the scrolls, I mean those negatives, are, you know…

David: I'm not in any way concerned with the use of the Dead Sea Scrolls other than by people who come here to use them. Okay? So, I'm not a scholar of Dead Sea Scrolls. I'm more than happy to work with the Masoretic texts of the Hebrew Bible and make changes on the basis of other versions as I see fit. But the non-biblical material of the Dead Sea Scrolls is not of great interest to me because I'm not into that period of Judaism. And whether exactly everything has been published in the way they appear in those photographs, I don't know. If there are differences, someday in the future someone may come and say, “Can you let me look at plate 41192?”

Nehemia: And you would let them do that?

David: Sure.

Nehemia: Wow. Okay.

David: We'd even give them a light table to see the plate on.

Nehemia: Wow. Let’s look at the Cairo Geniza stuff.

David: Now, this, we've discovered, came to the library at the end of the 1920’s.

Nehemia: Has this all been digitized?

David: Yes, all of this was digitized for the Friedberg Geniza project.

Nehemia: Which people can see online. And we’ll put a link on nehemiaswall.com

David: So, there's a bunch of stuff here. I'll grab a miscellaneous piece in Arabic.

Nehemia: Oh no, something in Hebrew, come on.

David: It’s Arabic and Hebrew. Well, they lived in Egypt! Come on!

Nehemia: No, but I can’t read Arabic.

David: You're not the only one. I used to be able to.

Nehemia: I took two years of it, but…

David: Scribbles. What is this? Oh, that's the old envelope. We put it in an acid-free envelope. I can't throw it away! It has important information written on it. We have acid-free envelopes and acid-free paper.

Nehemia: Wow. So, this is a page from the Cairo Geniza. Wow, that's parchment...

David: No, this is paper. Egypt was the home of paper.

Nehemia: Wow, very cool.

David: So, it's a folio, right? It's a folded piece of paper.

Nehemia: Oh, that’s not Judeo-Arabic, it's actual Arabic.

David: That's Arabic. So, let's see what else we have. This goes with this, and this goes with this, and this gets clipped on this.

Nehemia: There's a whole system here.

David: And everything is numbered. And we put this in 1127, that's right before 1128. And here's a Bible comment. So, what does this say?

Nehemia: Do you have any Bible fragments?

David: Probably. Let's see.

Nehemia: That's what we want to see.

David: People always hope that there's something magic in Bible. But what is the commentary of? Small part of the work… it’s in Judeo-Arabic.

Nehemia: Something in Arabic.

David: So, here is Bible, Exodus 21:35 to 23:29. And there's the first and last Hebrew word. It’s vocalized, it has dagesh and rafe, and its folio is damaged. So, we open it up carefully, and it's got the same acid-free, acid-free. And we open it up. And what's, of course, amazing about this Hebrew is it's 1,000 years old, or older, and it's quite readable.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, it's interesting, it doesn't have the ta’amim, the accent marks. This is not a Masoretic manuscript. It doesn't have the Masoretic notes.

David: But you'll notice how careful they are to put in rafe marks for various purposes.

Nehemia: Very interesting.

David: But you can certainly read it. "Ein lo damim…" bla la bla…

Nehemia: Can we turn the page?

David: Yeah, very carefully. That's why it's good that it's been digitized because we don't want to turn the page too often anymore.

Nehemia: I understand. Can we see the last page, so we don't have to turn in the middle?

David: Sure. "Lo tihiye machasheva va…"

Nehemia: Wait a minute. This is from the Leviticus. This is not from Exodus unless I'm wrong. I could be wrong about that.

David: I think this is from the end of the Covenant Code.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, it's Exodus 23 or so. I'm just curious to see how they wrote Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey, if you find an example of that. This is from the one section of Exodus where that name doesn't appear.

David: I was going to say, it's a problem with the Covenant Code.

Nehemia: Oh no. Here we go, this is interesting. Oh! Very interesting.

David: These are the three “drei Yuden”, "the three ‎Yuds". You find this throughout Oriental manuscripts.

Nehemia: Very interesting.

David: You find this in Chinese manuscripts. The Chinese Hebrew manuscripts use the three Yuds, sometimes one Yud on top of two Yuds.

Nehemia: In China today they use the Hashem. I brought a Ten Commandments from them. That's very interesting. Alright, yafe.

David: Okay?

Nehemia: Yeah, thank you so much.

David: My pleasure.

Nehemia: So, we just did this amazing series, with this amazing information and manuscripts you showed me, and you mentioned after… it always happens after I turn on turn off the recorder, you said people can come here. So, is this open to the public, this facility?

David: This facility is open to the public, and if you're a resident of the tri-state area you can borrow any of the 300-odd thousand books in the public stacks.

Nehemia: What is the tri-state area, for people from not around here?

David: Northern Kentucky, Eastern Indiana, Southern Ohio. But you're always welcome from wherever, Timbuktu, to come and look at the material in the library.

Nehemia: Now, they can't come and take out Cairo Geniza fragments.

David: No, that's why I said the 325,000 in the open stacks. The Cairo Geniza fragments they can come and look at, though, because they're all available online on the Friedburg Geniza project, they could look at them at home.

Nehemia: So, they can see those online. And we're sitting here in this room which has a number of rare books. Can they make an appointment to come and see these rare books?

David: Absolutely.

Nehemia: And how would they contact you; through the Hebrew Union College website?

David: They can contact the library… on the website there's a contact form.

Nehemia: And if there are people in, for example, Los Angeles or New York, or even Jerusalem, who want to have some interaction with the Hebrew Union College libraries, are those open to the public?

David: They can go and ask to use the library.

Nehemia: And it's open to the public?

David: The security in Los Angeles and New York, and also sometimes in Jerusalem, is a little tougher than it is here, but they may be asked to produce identification. We're a little bit… because we're here in God's own Eden in southern Ohio, we tend to have a smaller, and I guess some people think less threatening, group of visitors.

Nehemia: Okay. What kind of visitors come in LA that are threatening?

David: I don't know! But I know that three weeks ago the imam of the local mosque came, and we gave him a tour. He had a wonderful time! There's a mosque right down the street.

Nehemia: Okay, wonderful. You mean he came here?

David: Yeah! Had a great time. We talked, and I showed him all sorts of Arabic materials. A beautiful 13th century Quran.

Nehemia: Oh wow, you have a 13th century Koran here, among the other things? Wow, that's amazing. That's pretty cool.

David: Yeah!

Nehemia: Alright, thank you very much!

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VIDEO CHAPTERS
00:00 Intro
00:54 Research in the Information Age
09:45 Guadalajara Talmud
15:38 Samaritan mezuzah
19:30 The vault
22:14 Kaifeng
30:23 Cairo Genizah
33:49 Emanuel of Rome commentary on Ecclesiastes
38:49 Genizah again
41:55 Talmud Steinsaltz Edition
42:54 Genizah records
53:06 Cairo Genizah fragments
57:47 Outro

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Hebrew Voices #149 – Looking Under the Hood of a Torah Scroll: Part 2
Support Team Study – Looking Under the Hood of a Torah Scroll: Part 3
Support Team Study – Looking Under the Hood of a Torah Scroll: Part 4
Hebrew Voices #155 – Meet the Samaritans!
Support Team Study – Meet the Samaritan High Priest!
Support Team Study – The Samaritans and the Name of God

RELATED BOOKS
Torah Sheleima Volume 29
by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Kasher

OTHER LINKS
Hebrew Union College Library
Hebrew Union College Library Digitized Manuscript & Rare Books Gallery

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