Sacred Trash
The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza

With the skill of historians and the style of novelists, Hoffman and Cole tell the remarkable story of the medieval document trove that came to light in the 1890s and has kept scholars busy for over a century.

Geniza are writings with Hebrew letters on them – sometimes not in the Hebrew language – which traditional Jews preserved because of the sacredness of the letters. The actual content could be religious, literary, commercial, legal, or personal. The trove found in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat near Cairo contains 331,351 of such pieces of writing dating from as early as 870 A.D. and as late as a millennium later.

The authors approach their topic by alternating between the modern scholars and the Geniza's revelations. Solomon Schechter, Jefim Hayyim Schirmann, Ezra Fleischer, and S.D. Goitein unearthed and studied the materials, while the "sacred trash" brought such topics as the Ben Sira apocrypha, the Karaites, Andalusian poetry, and daily life in medieval Egypt to life. They trace the evolution of focus on the Geniza from Biblical criticism to poetry to history.

Hundreds of specialists, deploying a great array of linguistic and disciplinary skills, now aided by the magnificent Friedberg Genizah Project to inventory and digitize the entire collection, have studied this extraordinary collection of materials, chipping away at the immense volume, contributing brick by brick to the building of a unique scholarly edifice. There is probably no other learned pursuit so detailed, unexpected, ironic, singular, and humane as this one. In the words of Fleischer, "The recovery of the Geniza has meant … the spectacular completion of a breathtaking landscape, the perfect, harmonious, and inevitable unity of which all of a sudden seems revealed."

I could not put down this beautiful book and commend it to everyone.

Related Topics:  Egypt, History, Jews and Judaism receive the latest by email: subscribe to daniel pipes' free mailing list This text may be reposted or forwarded so long as it is presented as an integral whole with complete information provided about its author, date, place of publication, and original URL.