Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (Jewish Encounters Series) Paperback – June 21, 2016 by Adina Hoffman (Author), Peter Cole (Author) (Schocken)

The first part of the book is a wonderful scholarship - adventure story from the 1890's about the exciting discovery of a massive cache of a quarter million Hebrew documents spanning centuries, piled up in a storeroom in an ancient, long occupied synagogue in the old Jewish quarter of Cairo. The authors have researched the details how members of the British academic community, particularly Solomon Schechter, became aware of the cache and eventually recovered it, complete with inter-library competition, secrecy and personal ambition. It's part history buff, part Raiders of the Lost Ark. I found it interesting that the academics of the time were as competitive over texts from late antiquity as scientists today will be over some high profile discovery. Readers today might criticize that the recovery took place within an arrogant set of colonialist assumptions typical of the age, when English explorers assumed it was their right to appropriate major classical artworks and drag them from Greece and Rome back to London without asking anyone's permission. But in defense of Schechter it is likely that these documents, if not 'stolen' from Egypt, would subsequently have been lost in the upheavals of the following century. There are fascinating details such as the style of travel in late 1890's England - I did not know it was relatively easy to travel from London to Cairo in those days; train to Marseille and then a boat across the Mediterranean.

The narrative bogs down in the second half of the book when the authors, who are poets and literary historians, concentrate on their own special interest in medieval Hebrew poetry to the exclusion of much else in the collection. Nor do they make any attempt to bring out this subject for the general reader, presenting few actual examples of said poetry.

The best part of the book is the glimpse into the remaining content of the material, not only the biblically significant sources but the secular documents relating to the everyday life of the Jewish community of Egypt in the middle ages - personal letters, divorce legal documents. A page turner, well written by two authors with fluent Hebrew background. A door into a vast but little known era of Jewish life.