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

by Adina Hoffman, Peter Cole

One May day in 1896, at a dining-room table in Cambridge, England, a meeting took place between a Romanian-born maverick Jewish intellectual and twin learned Presbyterian Scotswomen, who had assembled to inspect several pieces of rag paper and parchment. It was the unlikely start to what would prove a remarkable, continent-hopping, century-crossing saga, and one that in many ways has revolutionized our sense of what it means to lead a Jewish life.

In Sacred Trash, MacArthur-winning poet and translator Peter Cole and acclaimed essayist Adina Hoffman tell the story of the retrieval from an Egyptian geniza, or repository for worn-out texts, of the most vital cache of Jewish manuscripts ever discovered. This tale of buried scholarly treasure weaves together unforgettable portraits of Solomon Schechter and the other heroes of this drama with explorations of the medieval documents themselves—letters and poems, wills and marriage contracts, Bibles, money orders, fiery dissenting tracts, fashion-conscious trousseaux lists, prescriptions, petitions, and mysterious magical charms. Presenting a panoramic view of nine hundred years of vibrant Mediterranean Judaism, Hoffman and Cole bring modern readers into the heart of this little-known trove, whose contents have rightly been dubbed “the Living Sea Scrolls.” Part biography and part meditation on the supreme value the Jewish people has long placed on the written word, Sacred Trash is above all a gripping tale of adventure and redemption.

Genres: History, Jewish, Nonfiction, Judaism, Religion, Judaica, Egypt

286 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Born in Jackson, Mississippi in 1967, Hoffman grew up in Peterborough, New Hampshire and Houston, Texas, and graduated from Wesleyan University in 1989. She has lived in Jerusalem since 1992 and writes often about the Middle East and its people, especially those who are overlooked in standard journalistic or textbook-styled accounts.

Her first book, House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood (Steerforth Press, 2000, Broadway Books, 2002) consists of a series of linked essays about her North African Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem. It was described by Kirkus Reviews as “steadily perceptive and brimming with informed passion.” In 2009 Yale University Press brought out her My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century, a life and times of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhammad Ali. The first biography ever published about a Palestinian writer, My Happiness was awarded Britain’s 2010 Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize and was named one of best twenty books of 2009 by the Barnes & Noble Review and one of the top ten biographies of the year by Booklist. Writing in The Independent, Boyd Tonkin called it “a remarkable book… A triumph of personal empathy and historical insight and a beacon for anyone who believes that ‘more joins than separates us.’” A 2011 Guggenheim Foundation fellow, Hoffman is married to MacArthur-winning poet and translator Peter Cole, and in 2011, she and Cole published a book they wrote together, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Schocken /Nextbook), which has been widely praised, with Harold Bloom calling it “a small masterpiece” and the Nation describing it as “a literary jewel whose pages turn like those of a well-paced thriller, but with all the chiseled elegance and flashes of linguistic surprise we associate with poetry... Sacred Trash has made history both beautiful and exciting.” In the Jewish press, the Chicago Jewish Star called it "captivating, with the drama of any good mystery… it has all the ingredients of a compelling work of fiction. Except that it's true."

Hoffman is formerly the film critic for the Jerusalem Post (1993–2000) and the American Prospect (2000–2002). Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Nation, the Washington Post, the Times Literary Supplement, Raritan, Bookforum, the Boston Globe, New York Newsday, Tin House, and on the World Service of the BBC. She is one of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions, a small, Jerusalem-based press that publishes the literature of the Levant. Hoffman has been a visiting professor at Wesleyan University and Middlebury College, and in 2009 was the Franke Fellow at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center. During the summer of 2011 she was the Distinguished Writer in Non-Fiction at NYU’s McGhee School. She now divides her time between Jerusalem and New Haven.

Reviews

[Trish · Rating 4 out of 5]

A friend introduced me to the reviews of Adina Hoffman in the The Nation, in which she discusses the work of Olivia Manning. Hoffman has the most exquisite sensibility toward the conflicts in the Levant that one ignores her opinion only at their own loss.

I was interested in whatever else she wrote so I came upon Sacred Trash about the 1896 discovery of the Cairo Geniza, a cache of documents stored in a small room in Cairo that are the original documents of ten centuries of societal interaction:

“one Middle Eastern, mostly middle-class Jewish community’s detritus—its letters and poems, its wills and marriage contracts, its bills of lading and writs of divorce, its prayers, prescriptions, trousseau lists, Bibles, money orders, amulets, court depositions, ship inventories, rabbinic responsa, contracts, leases, magic charms, and receipts.


…For reasons that remain obscure, in the case of the Palestinian Jews of Fustat, of Old Cairo—who worshipped in what would eventually become known as the Ben Ezra synagogue—the tradition of geniza was, it seems, extended to include the preservation of anything written in Hebrew letters, not only religious documents, and not just in the Hebrew language. Perhaps, as one scholar has proposed, “the very employment of the Hebrew script…sanctified written material.” Another theory holds that the Jews of this community may simply have piled up papers in their homes and periodically delivered whole cartfuls to the Geniza without bothering to separate sacred from secular writing. Or maybe, as another writer has suggested—in an effort to make sense of the hodgepodge of texts that have turned up in the Fustat Geniza—the impulse to guard the written word may have gone beyond piety and evolved into a 'generalized aversion toward casually discarding texts of any kind.' Whatever the explanation, for most of the last millennium, hundreds of thousands of scraps were tossed into the Ben Ezra Geniza, which came to serve as a kind of holy junk heap.”

Hoffman and Cole tell the story of how the cache of documents was found and what happened to it after that. They introduce us to the “active imaginations” of several people who could see what riches the cache held, as well as those who wanted to use the documents for their own personal aggrandizement. But mostly it is the chatty story of thrilling discoveries and talented scholars who were able to realize what they held. In 1999 the Toronto currency trader and avid bibliophile Albert Freidberg established a non profit whose aim to to inventory and digitize every Geniza scrap in existence. Eventually full-color photographs of the documents will be available on the Friedberg website.

In the final pages Hoffman and Cole write that rummaging in the Cairo Geniza is not unlike rummaging in the attic of history. They pay tribute to the scholars who take on the work of realizing the value of the documents for us today.

“…We’ve known all along that we’d find things that some would consider rubbish and others treasure. This, though, is what literature does, what writers do—and when it comes to it, what faith is. And as this book makes clear, it is also what the scholars of the Geniza have done, in a quietly heroic way, for more than a century now. If, with Cynthia Ozick, we think of history as ‘what we make from memory,’ then these scholars have quite literally be making history by re-remembering it, by putting it back together syllable by syllable under the intense pressure of powerfully informed and at times visionary imaginations.”

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing book about an amazing bit of history. The Cairo Geniza was a storehouse of discarded manuscripts held by a Cairene synagogue the scholarly value of which began to be realized at the end of the 19th century. It was, in fact, a staggering repository of information about all aspects of medieval Jewish (and other) life from about the 9th century on; a repository that has still not been fully assimilated over a hundred years after the bulk of it was brought to Cambridge by Solomon Schechter.

The authors note that many books like theirs could have been written, each focusing on entirely different people and themes. Likewise in this review, I can only mention a couple of things that struck me about and in their book.

The manuscripts were really taken to be trash (but, for various reasons, trash that could not be destroyed - in the case of many genizas (genizot is the real plural) because the pages were indeed sacred by bearing a reference to God, but in the case of the Cairene geniza, the net was cast more widely, no-one knows why) and as such their owners, the community around the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, Cairo were not loath to get rid of them to acquisitive scholars. But that transition from trash to priceless object of scholarship, something that any trash will, if old enough, go through (think of ancient middens!) is played out here for all to see. It is a fascinating and moving transformation.

Many of the characters involved in the scholarly study of the geniza, former shtetl Jews working alongside inhibited episcopalian Cambridge dons, united in an incredible knowledge of languages and history, are themselves subjects fit for much reflection. Their capacities to organize, to collate, to transcribe, to interpret, indeed just to remember, are awe-inspiring.

Then there are gems and the stories turned up in the geniza. Dunash ben Labrat was known as the instigator of a whole new turn in Jewish poetry when he moved to Spain from the East and started incorporating Arabic motifs and forms. Almost none of his poetry had survived, however; until, that is, nearly his complete works were unearthed in the geniza. One poem, however, much better than all his others, existed on a sheet torn down the middle of which only half was known. The poem seemed to be a wedding celebration. Eventually, in a geniza-typical mixture of serendipity and erudition, the fragment was reunited with its other half (itself in another collection excavated from the geniza and held halfway around the world). The completed poem turned out to be not a wedding celebration but a lament over a separation. And it was written not by Dunash ben Labrat, but by his wife, over their own enforced separation. This is the only known instance of a medieval Jewish poem by a woman, standing at the fountainhead of the entire tradition, superior in quality, all agree, to the poems of her husband.

Or, in an off-hand remark from the authors, we learn about an epic in the medieval German tradition, written in Yiddish (one of the earliest examples known of written Yiddish), preserved for hundreds of years in the Cairene synagogue, now studied by specialists in medieval German literature.

Fittingly, the authors close their book by quoting the mishnaic rabbi Ben Bag Bag, who wrote (about the Bible) "turn it and turn it, for all is contained in it." I wonder if any storehouse of written material has been rediscovered in modern times to such monumental effect, revolutionizing our knowledge of so many fields, needing over a hundred years (and still counting) of collaborative effort to tame and organize.

[Gwen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book, part of the Schocken/Next series, both is and is not what it promises. The book is very much about the Cairo Geniza, but less about what is found than who does the finding. Credit, deservedly so, goes to scholar after scholar who finds value in scraps and fragments, and can piece these fragments to much other extant scholarship. In learning about these many men (and some women), I feel indebted to their keen minds and exploratory spirits, coupled with adventurous travels and serious reserves of time and money. "Who" is very clear, as are "when" and "why." I was hoping for more "what," how these pieces of everyday life in the crossroads of the world at the turn of a millennium have changed what we know, or what we think we know. Poetry, sects, and more yield to more information, and the Jewish mother? She, apparently, remains constant over the centuries.
The photographs are well-placed, the citations helpful in this not-trash for, by, and about scholars whose work matters a great deal to themselves and, hopefully, others as well.

[Tom · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book disappointed me. I heard an interview on NPR during which the authors talked about all of the different documents that were recovered and the story these documents told of life in the community which dated around 100BC.

Having read 2/3 of the book I gave up, This is the story of the people and efforts involved in the archeological effort. It was somewhat interesting. Clearly I misinterpreted the NPR review which talked about the wealth of business contracts, pre nuptial agreements and other civil documents that would have been interesting to read about. In fact the book covers the individuals involved in deciphering and cataloging the documents - not much of the documents themselves.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's invigorating to find out about scholars set on bringing to life the lives of our ancestors, out of the archives which continue, understandably, to be unknown by millions who nevertheless may learn of the contents which, pieced together, join fragmented manuscripts into cohesive evidence restored.

Hoffman and Cole assemble a narrative intended to dramatize those who recovered the genizah heap of scraps of paper or other formats upon which for centuries a "highbrow Hebrew" garbage dump of scribbles, texts, letters, documents, and invoices had been tossed into a repository in a Cairo Jewish house of worship. The 900-1200 CE period appears the main concentration, but we get a Yiddish emigre from Prague chiding her doctor son, now far away from her adopted Jerusalem home, to take care of her in plaints which could have been penned by a Jersey sitcom mom in a pat comedy routine.

The authors, however, strive to discuss at length both intellectual debates and professorial careers. I found this material less dull than likely most who'd read this account. But most audiences would, I also estimate, favor deeper discussions of the everyday people whose worries, purchases, families, and prayers populate the marginal material which probably the academic scrutinizers at Cambridge or the U. of Pennsylvania passed over in their first forays into what's almost two hundred thousand separate pieces of evidence.. As Hoffman and Cole.remind us, before 1200, about 90% of the Jews lived in what we now call the Middle East or Levant under Muslim rule, and the findings from the Egyptian hoard attest to the diaspora and the already vast span of commerce, migration, and community in its flux.

[Susan Wester · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Sacred Trash, MacArthur-winning poet and translator Peter Cole and acclaimed essayist Adina Hoffman tell the story of the retrieval from an Egyptian geniza, or repository for worn-out texts, of the most vital cache of Jewish manuscripts ever discovered. This tale of buried scholarly treasure weaves together unforgettable portraits of Solomon Schechter and the other heroes of this drama with explorations of the medieval documents themselves—letters and poems, wills and marriage contracts, Bibles, money orders, fiery dissenting tracts, fashion-conscious trousseaux lists, prescriptions, petitions, and mysterious magical charms. Presenting a panoramic view of nine hundred years of vibrant Mediterranean Judaism, Hoffman and Cole bring modern readers into the heart of this little-known trove, whose contents have rightly been dubbed “the Living Sea Scrolls.” Part biography and part meditation on the supreme value the Jewish people has long placed on the written word, Sacred Trash is above all a gripping tale of adventure and redemption.

[Eli · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book about the Cairo Genizah. I would say that I really liked except in every chapter I wanted just a little more info about what they learned from the findings described in that chapter. It seemed like there were some really interesting things that they learned, but they only told you about some of them. Left me wanting to know more, but without saying where to go to learn more. That said, I did learn a lot from it about Spanish Jewish poetry, Maimonides son, the Karaites, and other topics.

[Koen Crolla · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard to overstate the importance of the Cairo geniza to our understanding of Jewish medieval history and to Hebrew philology. Hoffman and Cole put together a very human interest account of its discovery and the early stages of its dissemination, though their coverage of the people involved—the back cover calls them heroes, though by modern academic standards most of them are certainly just looters and hacks, including Solomon Schechter himself—is less interesting than the accounts of some of the materials found, including not just the Hebrew Ben Sira that everyone knows about (the Book of Sirach/Ecclesiasticus, which made it into the Catholic Bible but not the Hebrew one and so was eventually lost in the original Hebrew and only available in translation until it was rediscovered here), but also lost poems by Yannai (the piyyut, not the amora), a considerable amount of Andalusian poetry, documents offering interesting new perspectives on the development of Karaite Judaism, and even some autographs by the Rambam and (particularly) his son.
It's certainly a gen-pub treatment, but it's a story that should be more widely known.

[Lisa Feld · Rating 4 out of 5]

Other kids grow up with legends of pirate treasure, but as a rabbi's kid I grew up with the legend of the Cairo Geniza, that back room of a medieval synagogue stuffed with worn-out manuscripts and forgotten until the twentieth century, when it was restored to offer major insights into Jewish medieval thought and daily life.

But the process of discovering the treasure, as Hoffman and Cole reveal, was a long one, full of detours and way-stations. The manuscripts were almost destroyed before their discovery by a collapsing roof that left them exposed for years. Several scholars abandoned the quest before Solomon Schechter discovered their worth. And even then, early scholars prioritized some manuscripts as real finds and others as either too pedestrian or too damaged to be of interest, so potential treasures were nearly lost again. In each generation of the treasure hunt, Hoffman and Cole show how each scholar made discoveries that eluded their predecessors, and more importantly, why those discoveries matter: the birth of medieval Jewish poetry (whose absence was previously seen as proof that Jews had no inherent culture), raging philosophical arguments that transformed religion, and anthropological data that created a vivid picture of medieval daily life.

While the book drags in a few places (such as the descriptions of the also-rans who failed to recognize the geniza's worth before Schechter rescued it), there are also vivid and intriguing details throughout, from the scholar Israel Davidson, whose real name was lost to his parents' superstition, to an exquisite collaborative poem written by a medieval husband and wife at their parting, to the face masks Schechter had to wear to keep his beloved but rotting manuscripts from killing him while he worked. I got a new appreciation for the complexity and human struggle of a process I had thought was wonderful but straightforward.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just an amazing book, beautifully constructed as well as stuffed with learning and astonishingly educated oddballs. Clearly meant as a metaphorical recreation of the geniza itself and successful in that endeavor--a story that creates a Borgesian sense of life and literature interwoven, except in reality. The geniza was a repository for the Cairo Jewish community's unacceptable texts of all sorts, which could not simply be destroyed (the underlying theological notion of the eternal life of the written word prohibiting that) and thus were interred behind a wall in the women's part of the synagogue, then rediscovered several different times in the 1890s, bound out from Egypt in one of those resource-grabs the empires were so good at (no mention of Zahi Hawass here, so maybe he doesn't see this as part of Egypt's cultural patrimony), and then slowly and painstakingly (continuing to this day) reconstituted by a corps of ludicrously learned scholars, many but not all Brits, with various degrees of comfort within the English class system. (Most were Jewish, with a few philo-Semites thrown in.) The results have been revelatory for Jewish religious, cultural, political, and social history, and the authors have fun with their various scholars' compulsions and oddities while also respecting the magnitude of their effort and achievement. Best part: Jewish mothers complaining their sons don't write and don't call, in the 13th century.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look into the adventurous people who spent their careers looking for and deciphering 1000 years worth of text fragments in the Cairo Geniza. Easy to read -- I read it on vacation! But really interesting.

[Meredith · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very difficult to get through and the gems of information about what the genizah is and what was found there are buried in awkward language and too-academic a focus. :( I have since heard that "Sacred Treasure" is a more accessible book on the same topic.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

From a thorough and intriguing definition of genizah to the fascinating interplay of personalities and discoveries that emerged from this storehouse of more than 100,000 documents from 1,000 years ago, a totally engaging read.

[Ben Pashkoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well done overview into the people and places invovled in the now present day Cairo Genizah research. Developes an incredible taprestry into history (present and medieval) of peoples flung from all across Europe, Asia and the mid-east.

[Loen · Rating 4 out of 5]

So tangental, but now I need to learn more about JTS chancellor Cyrus Adler's role in the World's Columbian Exposition (aka Chicago World's Fair) of 1893. Did he invent PBR, the dishwasher, and the Ferris Wheel?

[Drew Brads · Rating 4 out of 5]

All I knew about the Cairo Geniza before reading this book was that sometimes documents from it show up in the apparatus of Biblia Hebraica. I was surprised at what a fascinating backstory this cache of documents has. This book read like a series of mini-biographies of scholars who devoted part or all of their lives to the (ongoing!) task of deciphering, sorting, and cataloging the hundreds of thousands of documents recovered from this glorified closet of a Cairo synagogue. The theme that emerges is that one man’s (and even one scholar’s) trash is another man’s treasure. Which is more valuable: the long lost Hebrew original of Sirach, or the thousands of mundane documents which allow for the historical reconstruction of an entire society? Both were discovered in the Geniza.

The care and passion for the written page expressed by the scholars that the book profiles is matched by the book’s creative, almost poetic style. My only disappointment is that one of the elements of the Geniza that the authors opted not to explore in detail is the biblical texts that were discovered therein, which were what initially drew me to the book.

[Andy Oram · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the authors focus on different researchers in Jewish history, religion, and literature (each superhuman is his or her own way), they also provide important new dimensions to our understanding of Jewish history. For a long time, the Middle Ages was largely a blank page in our history. Even now, most people who are interested in Jewish history don't know the important things discovered over the past century and a quarter, such as a fine poem written in the tenth century by a woman.

While reading, I said to myself, "I haven't spent much time reading books about this period of history. Would I be interested in reading about the people who created the books about this period of history?" But I was!

Incredible photographic techniques make it possible nowadays to extract texts from physical fragments that are thousands of years old. The Afterword of this book touches on this.

[Phrodrick slowed his growing backlog · Rating 4 out of 5]

In reading the book theThe Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels; I was fascinated by a short chapter that outlined the way the sisters passed information to Prof, Solomon Schechter about a possible trove of Judaica in a hidden room in Cairo. The sisters were Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, Scottish twins and largely self-taught scholars of many languages and discovers and translators of what remains after 130 years one of the oldest copies of the new testament. Prof Schechter was a Romanian born, Cambridge Talmud Scholar and the hidden room whose contents the Professor would reveal to modern scholars was the ancient Geniza of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, the old city of Cario.

Sacred Trash is the book that completes this story, linking the various scholars of the Geniza of Cairo to their many finds. The reader is given a taste of the many significant finds scattered among the more than 100,000 rotting, stuck together and over written documents, fragments, seemly random remains recovered from this 1000 year-old heap.

That the Heap existed at all was something nearing a fluke. In Jewism there was a practice that made peoplereluctant place into the trash any document that may contain reference to G-D. Almost anything written by a religious leader, Rabbi, Jewish merchant or Jewish mother might contain such a reference. Many communities would interpret this practice to include ceremonial burial of collections- called Geniza- and at least one community took to dropping their Geniza into the local river. At the Ben Ezra Synagogue the practice was to place them in disordered stacks in a hard to access room above the Women's Section of the synagogue .

Co Authors Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole have performed an admirable job in writing a generally readable discussion that balances between biographies of leading scholars involved the in on going analysis of this material, and helping to reader to appreciate the historic, cultural and religious value of this Cambridge and related Geniza collections. They have deliberately avoided some of the more purely religious and superstitious findings while mentioning that some of these may have greater value than some topic given more coverage. Some of what is discussed helps the reader to appreciate areas of Jewish Poetry and personalities that had been completely lost except for what has been recovered for modern analysis.

One can only marvel at the fact that Geniza documents were from the beginning published to worlds' academic audience and through them to anyone interested in such material. Contrast this with the long time segregation of Dead Sea Scroll studies. There is an almost ironic parallel in the fact that Geniza documents were collected from a population of Jews living in open and daily contact with the world, while the Dead Sea Scrolls are the documents of a Jewish population that had deliberately withdrawn for the world.

The authors of Sacred Trash succeeded in writing a mostly readable, entertaining and scholarly history of a complex topic. A reader will gain respect for dedicated and tireless modern scholars as well as the complexities of an ancient religion, surviving in an exiled people. Unfortunately , the authors seem to envision their readers as people who by scholarly interest of Jewish heritage have a fair amount of Hebraic and Jewish background. For Example we are told that the poetry of the previously lost Yannai made use of "collections of Midrash that were edited in the late fifth century C. E. ...." What a midrash is not entirely clear. The point being that some Hebrew is explained while other terms are assumed to be understood by the reader. This assumption becomes more common towards the end of the book. It also struck me that several mentions of women as writers of poetry, business leaders and related roles are not given sufficient attention while it is suggested, if only humorously that Geniza fragments would support a study focused on Jewish Mothers and their sons.

Hoffman and Cole have not, nor was it their intention to publish a definitive history of Geniza scholarship. In fact the field is not close to ripe for its elegy. Instead Sacred Trash is a completer book the of Sisters of Sinai teaser, and a generally easy read for those with a curiosity for this kind of unlikely story.

[Rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too much biography about the people involved and very little about the actual writings. Should be called sacred trash collectors.

[Jim Leffert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hoffman and Cole introduce us to the Cairo Geniza. This room in the Synagogue in Fustat (Old Cairo) in which the community stored old documents written in Hebrew letters, in the belief that the sacred language should not be discarded, has yielded an extraordinary bounty. The hundreds of thousands (!) of smelly fragments found there are bringing to light--and life—sacred texts, rabbinic opinions, sectarian conflicts, history, poetry from the Golden Age of Spain, and every day social, economic, commercial life of Jews in the first millennium and beyond.

The vast findings include more than 60 documents in the handwriting of Maimonides, the towering 12th century religious authority, philosopher, and physician. Moreover, this Levantine treasure trove has an “Old World”-wide reach. For example, it revealed details of the India spice trade, reported about a community of Khazars in 12th century Kiev (the oldest written reference to that city), and has even preserved a 420-line poem, in rhyming quatrains, from the 14th century, in Yiddish! The Geniza is still yielding up new discoveries, as present day researchers pour over the mass of fragments.

The book has two foci: the story of the people who first recognized the value of the Ben Ezra Synagogue’s odoriferous detritus and who have coaxed so much valuable information and literary material from this confused mass of fragments; and the discoveries themselves, which illuminate many forgotten or obscure aspects of an entire civilization. Like a book about Machu Picchu that’s not about Hiram Bingham or about Troy that’s not about Schliemann, Sacred Trash’s main character is the Geniza and its contents, not any single person. That the book continually shifts its focus from one human character to another can be disconcerting. No sooner was I drawn into the life story of Solomon Schechter, the larger than life figure who did the most to draw scholarly attention to the Geniza and who opened the largest amount of its materials to scholarly study--just as I was looking forward to the continuation of his story--Schechter moved from England to America and the authors brought on other scholars who preceded and followed him to take their turns in the spotlight.

Hoffman and Cole’s account of the contents of the Geniza--how researchers’ painstaking work has uncovered forgotten corners of Jewish history, literature, religious thought, and commerce--is filled with apt, well-told examples. The authors celebrate the interplay between modern researchers and ancient fragments, pointing out that each researcher approaches the material with his or her unique curiosity and creative questioning which, combined with enormous detail work, leads to new discoveries from this seemingly endless gold mine of material.

[thewanderingjew · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading one third of this book, I decided to put it down and leave it to those better versed in Hebraic study. I gave it three stars, because I felt certain that those who study Jewish antiquities will find this a treasure trove of information and rather than discourage those who would probably endow it with five stars, I wished to leave the door open.

A great deal of research went into the production of this book. It is a scholarly tome. The little gossipy tidbits make the rather dry discovery in Cairo, a bit more interesting, but the sentence structure seemed so convoluted and complicated, at times, that by the time I reached the end of the sentence, I was unsure of how it actually began. Although I did my own research to try and shed more light on the subject this book covers, I found that I would have to be a true student of Judaic history, before I could really appreciate and understand it. There were just too many holes in my background for me to comprehend its true value. It is written more for a student of this subject matter than for a mere reader with an interest in the subject.

Jewish treasures are, and have always been, stored and/or discarded in a special way. This book is about the treasures that were found in a repository in Cairo, the Cairo Genizah, a sacred storage place for Hebrew documents and books, at the tail end of the 1800’s. These manuscripts and records enlightened the world about Jewish history and connected the history of the Jews in an unbroken thread.

In 1896, twins Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson shared a fragment of a manuscript they had come upon in their travels, with Solomon Schechter. He continued to research the fragment and then traveled to Egypt to unearth a majority of the artifacts remaining there. Before these three, many other scholars had found remnants of genizas and Jewish documents, and they had scrabbled over their ownership and credit for discovery. Some understood the value of the discoveries; some thought of the wet, flea-ridden and weathered pieces of history as garbage, not worth saving and some thought the information was better left undiscovered or untold or told according to their own, possibly Anti-Semitic interpretation.

It is enough for me that Solomon Schechter appreciated the worth of the tiny fragment handed to him that day in 1896, recognized the historic Hebrew language it was written in, understood it was a piece of the original Ben Sira, and proceeded to unearth, decipher, translate and preserve the remaining manuscripts for posterity, shedding light on the authenticity of Jewish history in the process.

[George Kaposi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful book dealing mostly with the recovery of a little known period of Jewish history as a result of the discovery of the Cairo Genizah. The latter was a repository of ancient Jewish documents spanning mostly from the 7th through the 15t centuries although there are documents from other eras. Currently, there are over 330,000 documents of fragments of documents and the book relates the discovery of the Genizah and the realization of the significance of the contents. Among the many intellectual giants is Solomon Schechter, who worked tirelessly to move the documents from Cairo to Cambridge and then to the Jewish Theological Seminary in NY, catalog them and describe the most significant documents, including the original Hebrew version of Ben Sirah which, until its discovery in the Genizah, existed only in Greek translation.
The Genizah gives a full picture of the life and interactions of the Jews during the Middle Ages not only in Egypt but the whole Middle East, including Persia, Iraq, Jerusalem and the substantial commercial interaction of Jewish merchants with the many countries of the Mediterranean area but also as far as India. The book also deals with the intellectual environment of the times, the great poets Ibn Ezra, Yehuda HaLevi and Dunash ben Labrat. There is a nice chapter about the interaction between the traditional Rabbinic outlook and the Karaite Jewish communities and other ‘free thinking’ segments of the Jewish community. Also touched upon is the basic social interaction between Jews and Moslems and the instances of persecution under some Moslem rulers. Overall, however, it is clear that the Jews lived securely under the Moslem rule as long they accepted a second class status.
If nothing else, a book such as Sacred Trash throws light on a very dynamic Jewish community during the Middle Ages, their every day communal lives and their wide ranging commercial and religious activities. Sadly, the Jewish contribution to various aspects of society have been neglected by mainstream historians and this book helps, to a small extent, to rectify the situation.

[Jaci · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Cairo geniza was a repository for worn-out texts in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat (old Cairo). The stash of documents was discovered at various points in time by an amazing number of scholars and sellers of antiquities. The recovery of the pieces removed, their translation, preservation, conservation, cataloging, and digitization is a testament to Jewish scholarship and plain determination. The geniza texts brought to life medieval Jewish poetry and the common lives of Mediterranean Jews. The people who have dedicated their lives to this raise a standard not commonly met.
p.16: "...crammed to bursting with nearly ten centuries' worth of one Middle Eastern, mostly middle-class Jewish Community's detritus"
p.19: "Maintaining the practice of concealment, ironically, made future revelation possible, as, over the centuries, an inadvertent archive was amassed."
p.71: "...so bitten by the mosquitoes, 'ich full of spots bin.'" [Been there.]
p.96: "Normally a palimpsest contains two strata, though on at least one Geniza occasion we find three."
p.118: "'Each photostat is a prayer congealed,' he wrote. ... The dust of the generations has to be shaken from them...a day doesn't pass without resurrection.'"
p.205: interpretive sociographer: "one who describes a culture by means of its texts"
p.230: joins: the reunion of long-separated parts of a torn manuscript
p.232: vowels weren't always placed under the Hebrew letters, where we are used to finding them today...once the vowels were placed above the Hebrew letters
p.281: the description of the Friedberg Project: http://www.princeton.edu/~geniza/

[cheeseblab · Rating 5 out of 5]

First, you'll want to know, as I did, what the hell a geniza is. Well, it's sort of a haphazard burial place for Hebrew texts sacred and profane--it is designed, as one source says, to protect good texts from harm and bad ones from harming. The particular geniza studied here was originally in a medieval synagogue in a predominantly Jewish (but not ghettoized; this was a time when Jews and Christians were not segregated or repressed by a Muslim majority) district in Cairo.

Full disclosure: authors are my neighbors and drinking buddies, but my sense of obligation extended only to going to a reading; it was after that reading grabbed me that I bought and read and loved the book. Think Indiana Jones exploring a paper recycling bin. OK, wait, don't think of it that way--that sounds really boring. Still, there's a big dose of Indy here--but there are several of him, over more than a century. And discoveries over that time more stunning than the Dead Sea scrolls (which were themselves discovered in what may well have been a geniza).

An exciting tale beautifully rendered. Best nonfiction work I've read in some time.

[Maggie Anton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting that both this book and Sacred Treasure - The Cairo Genizah: The Amazing Discoveries of Forgotten Jewish History in an Egyptian Synagogue Attic were published almost simultaneously in 2011, so I decided to read them both back to back. Both detail [and I do mean detail] the history of the discovery of the Cairo Geniza, a repository for old Jewish manuscripts. But this one reads like a scholarly tome, more a history of the scholars who worked on the geniza manuscripts than on the geniza itself.

I was particularly disappointed that Friedburg Geniza project for digitalizing all the known fragments, which will surely revolutionize the study of these manuscripts, was barely mentioned in the .afterword. Even worse, one would never know from this book that the majority of geniza texts are spells, incantations, and instructions for performing these from myriads of ancient magic manuals.

If you want to read one book on the Cairo Geniza, read Mark Glickman's, not this one

[Miriam Kahn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating view of scholarship, archaeology, and the Cairo Geniza. Hoffman follows the history of the discovery, transcription, and translation of the myriad written and printed materials found in the Cairo geniza. If you are interested in late 19th and 20th century literary, biblical, and Jewish textual study, this book is perfect for you. Hoffman writes for a general educated Jewish audience, with bibliographic essays supporting each chapter. After finishing the book, I want to learn more about the millennium of riches stored within the geniza, now disbursed amongst various libraries in Europe and North America.

[Vince · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much better than expected. A Geniza is a final resting place for sacred writings etc. In Cairo one was found that was floor to ceiling stretching back a thousand years. This was in the 1870s and scholars today are still poring over it. The author does a good job of explaing both the significance of certain works and also the scholars who have worked on the material. An excellent read even if you have no interest in Hebrew scripture per se as loads of other material was found in the pile which has led to understanding how a community lived year in and year out.

[RUSA CODES · Rating 5 out of 5]

The 2012 Sophie Brody Medal winner.

Sacred Trash recounts the discovery and retrieval of worn-out Jewish documents from the Cairo Geniza. In this religiously-mandated repository, medieval documents were found that render a fascinating view of a 900-year span of a vibrant Mediterranean Jewish culture by examining not only sacred texts, but also wills, contracts, letters and other everyday documents.

For the complete list of 2012 Sophie Brody honor books, please visit RUSA Awards 2012

[K C · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting account of how supposed rubbish can become such a rich source of material for understanding a culture and society, and the scholars that have and are still mining the buried treasure. Don't know whether it makes me want to shred, burn and destroy all my documents, electronic and paper, to preserve my privacy, now and in the future, or to leave them for some third millenium scholar to use as resource material!

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone interested in ancient texts or comparative religion. Some basic knowledge of Judaism is necessary to fully appreciate the book, but no Hebrew language is necessary. Hoffman takes scholarly materials and writes about them in an entertaining and approachable way. The one consistent annoyance was that the photos and figures were not labeled on the page, but rather in an appendix.