In reading the book the Sisters of Sinai, The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels (Vintage); 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 one of the oldest copies of the new testament. Prof Schechter was a Romanian born, Cambridge Tulmud 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 Jewish believe there had been a reluctance 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.
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 , tehe authors seem sto envision their readers as people who by scholarly interest of Jewish heritage have a fair Hebrew and Jewish training. 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 iza 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.
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