Well of Moses at Ben Ezra Synagogue
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Our subject today takes in a multitude of stories, both full and fragmented, real and fiction.
In one of them, written in the hand of a man named Yosef, active as the 12th century turned into the 13th, a traveller comes across a pit in the ground, and looking down he sees a monkey, a tiger, a snake, and a goldsmith.
I must help this man, the traveller thinks, for how could he not? And he lowers a rope. But each time he does so and pulls the rope back up, one of the animals comes up instead, one after the other, each one telling him that he should not save the goldsmith. Their gratitude would be sincere, they insisted, while the goldsmith’s most certainly would not. He should leave the man where he’d found him.
Of course, the traveller could not in good conscience actually do that, could not simply abandon the goldsmith to such a fate. He rescued the goldsmith from the pit just as he had the animals, and all who he raised up, smith included, honoured him, promising that should his travels ever bring him through their city, they would do everything they could to help him.
With that, our source breaks off, the material torn raggedly through the centre of the story, but fortunately for us it’s a tale that we know, a familiar one, dating back, in its original form, to an ancient Indian collection of fables and framing narratives, and since appearing all across the world in translations. So we can pick the story back up on our own, following the traveller to that city where help was promised him, the specific place, as with many elements of the story, varying somewhat between the different versions.
When the traveller reached the city, the monkey welcomed him with gifts of fresh fruit, very much as promised. The tiger, as promised but perhaps not as expected, welcomed him by killing the king’s daughter and delivering to him her jewels. But then when the traveller took those jewels to the goldsmith, hoping for him to sell them on his behalf, the treacherous goldsmith went immediately to the king, informing the ruler that he could deliver the vile murderer who was responsible for his daughter’s death.
It did not look good for our traveller, not until the snake reentered the story. That last animal would be there to save the traveller from execution at the king’s hands, and it would instead be the goldsmith who faced the punishment, his crime, the betrayal of his generous benefactor.
“I understand what you’ve told me about a king’s choosing to restore certain people to favor,” said the king to the philosopher in the introduction to one version of the tale. “Now tell me a parable about those to whom he should show favor, those who should be trusted and on whose help he can rely.”
This was the sort of story you could find in today’s subject, this among a great many other sorts of things.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast where we travel through that medieval world and its history through the stories of its many travellers, or at least most of the time. Sometimes, our subjects aren’t people who travel all that much. Sometimes our subjects aren’t people at all, but we’ll get to all of that. First of all though, I should mention that this is a podcast with a Patreon, one where you can listen to episodes early and ad-free, one where I post extra mini episodes every month, and one that you can gain access to for as little as a dollar a month, or as much as makes sense to you, and really help me out tremendously in the process. Whether that’s just for a month or two, or on a longer term basis, I really appreciate your support either way.
And now, back to the story.
Today’s episode is not the story of an individual but rather of a text, or of a great many texts, of a collected body of sacred and secular writings, or rather bodies of writings. It’s a story of scripture, court records, correspondence, literature, scholarly studies, rabbinic texts, and business and personal contracts, of everything really, human life as it has left its echoes in writing, and how these particular echoes reach us, carrying over the centuries, sometimes carrying over a millennium.
If you have listened to that last episode on Wuhsha the Broker, then you may already have guessed that that collection of documents that we’re talking about here is the Cairo Geniza, but you don’t need to have done so to listen to this one.
I thought, after last time out, that I should say more about that geniza, more about what it entailed, its own history, and that of its quote/unquote “discovery” there in the Ben Ezra Synagogue of Fustat, now part of Cairo, in the late 19th century. First though, we should address the question: what is a geniza?
It is important to note that Cairo’s was not the only one. The “geniza,” originating in a Hebrew root word, meaning “to hide,” was not something unique to that particular synagogue—there have, for example, been studies of genizot found in Bohemian synagogues—and indeed it was not unique to synagogues at all. A geniza was a storage, an archive, a place of burial for documents, if only temporary. Sometimes, the geniza was a kind of last resting place for a text, sometimes a sort of stopover, after which it might be buried, alongside an upstanding individual or else alone.
You find genizot in synagogues, in their basements or their attics, but also in cemeteries and caves. Their purpose, as one scholar put it with pleasing simplicity, was the “twofold [one] of preserving good things from harm and bad things from harming.” In the latter category were those threatening texts, those deemed heretical which were best secured where they wouldn’t cause trouble, buried, or in one instance, safely set away beneath a staircase step. Mostly though, genizot were for that other category, writings on religious topics that were physically worn or had served their purpose and now were respectfully put to rest.
That would, in itself, be something wonderful for us to find. Imagine, a large stash of 11th-century religious writings, helpfully preserved as if only for 21st-century scholars to examine in exquisite detail, learn from it what they can, and communicate their findings to us. You wouldn’t turn it down, but what we have here is even better. It was not limited in its scope to the 11th century, having material from as late as the 19th century and as early as the 6th. It was also not just strictly limited to religious writings.
In part, this was because sacred content was not always matched only to sacred concerns. Clearly, the latter category would include theological discussions, rabbinic literature, and books of prayer, but the name of God itself rendered a text sacred, and that you might find anywhere, in an invocation to open a letter for example, or somewhere among talk of a divorce. You might find it anywhere, so all sorts of documents might find themselves preserved as precaution rather than being casually discarded. In the case of the Cairo Geniza, it has been supposed that Hebrew lettering itself imbued the object with a kind of sanctity, or else materials were delivered and deposited without being sorted, maybe better to bring too much than to bring too little and accidentally dispose of something improperly.
So it perhaps was in that geniza where, as S. D. Goitein puts it, “official, business, learned, and private correspondence” were all preserved, “court records, contracts and other legal documents, accounts, bills of lading, prescriptions, etc.” Where you’d find a community’s “letters and poems, its wills and marriage contracts, its … writs of divorce, its prayers, … its trousseau lists, Bibles, money orders, amulets, … shop inventories, rabbinic responsa, … leases, magic charms, and receipts.”
There, among the liturgy, astronomy, theology, and law, you find complaints about “hot bedbugs,” and truly all manner of medical ailments. You find alchemy, and acknowledgement that the shipment of opium has arrived. You find allegations of necromancy, and recipes for ointment, ink, or cheese. You find requests for “indigo, pepper, arsenic, ammonia water and more.” You find doodles. You find, as one scholar described it, a combination “of sacred lumber-room and secular record office.”
One example that reaches us is a 13th-century poem, its writer homesick, exquisitely so, for absent Alexandria:
"Yearning has not left me any endurance,” he wrote, “but visits me day and night.
My endurance is dead, entombed deep in the bottom of a grave.
The boats of my longing have thrown anchor on the shores of yearning."
These were documents that people were done with—they had served their purpose, whatever that was—and so they often don’t reach us in quite their entirety. The physical object may contain writing on both sides. It may be worn, torn, or otherwise damaged. It may have been repurposed, a state document becoming a personal letter. Passages are missing or in parts illegible.
“I cannot taste anything edible,” wrote one man to a physician. “Yesterday I rolled bread crumbs into two little balls, but after having eaten about a quarter ounce of bread, I hiccupped until midnight, and believed the hiccup would never stop. Then my soul desired a bit of fried cheese, but....”
And there it trailed off, leaving us uncertain as to the results of the poor man’s fried cheese cravings, though it seems they produced no happy result.
“For three days more [the call of] nature has not come to me,” he continued. “Fever, headache, weakness, and shaking do not leave me all day long. Moreover, I cannot taste anything, not even lemon with sugar.”
What remains of these pieces is quite often such a fragment, often not the whole document and frequently much less complete than this example. But there are so many of these fragments that the result, in the case of the Cairo Geniza, is truly incredible, a gift that has already provided so much and has so much still to tell us as scholars continue to work with it. A remarkable resource, its contents mostly from the mid-10th to 13th-centuries, then lessening with the diminishing community there to use it, diminishing of plague, famine, and migration, but picking up again in clusters in the 16th and 19th centuries.
The Cairo Geniza was brought to light by a cast of intriguing characters in their own right, people outside of this podcast’s usual timeframe but well-worth mentioning here. There were the Scottish twin sisters, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson. They were widely travelled in their 19th-century world, learning more than a few of its languages and photographing thousands of manuscript pages, many of which they purchased, transcribed, and translated.
One of them, Agnes, was a published author of novels and travel books and a self-educated scholar of Arabic and Syriac. You can freely read her 1870 book online if you’re interested. It’s called Eastern Pilgrims: The Travels of Three Ladies and takes in, for example, her disappointment at the experience of visiting Gethsemane, which seemed to her much more English garden than Biblical grandeur. The other, Margaret who contributed to her sister’s work, was also the editor of her husband’s Cervantes translation. I’ve seen the pair described as “devout (not to mention eccentric and notoriously party-throwing) Presbyterians” who had earned respect even in the male-centric Cambridge of their time with, among other things, their discovery of an early manuscript of the Old Syriac Gospels.
There was also the Moldavian-born scholar, rabbi, and foundational figure in American Conservative Judaism, Solomon Schechter. He was often characterized in terms of his wild and unkempt appearance, his unruly hair, his mismatched socks, his coat smeared with cigar ash and snuff—it paints quite a picture. He was a violent gesticulator in conversation, in debate, a quote, “wounded lion,” “rising from his chair, [and] perhaps kicking it down.” He was described by his good friend James Frazer, he of Golden Bough fame, as being “great in his intellect and learning, greater even in the warmth of his affections and his enthusiasm for every high and noble cause.”
It was Agnes and Margaret who brought some pages from Fustat back to Cambridge, Solomon who recognized them for what they were, knew a scrap which appeared “as if a grocer had used it for something greasy” to be something extraordinary and valuable.
He was the one who went back to remove a great deal of the rest from where it had been stored, the one whose name is still attached to the collection at Cambridge, the one who in 1897 journeyed to the Ben Ezra Synagogue of Fustat, Egypt, a place that in Rebecca Jefferson’s words had, in the medieval period, been “central to the community’s religious, educational, and organizational activities, serving as a study house, courthouse, and meeting place for anything to do with local social, economic, and political affairs, as well as a connecting point for those engaged in the trading networks of the Mediterranean.” He was the one who convinced the rabbi there to allow him access, to be shown up a ladder at the far end of the 2nd floor women's gallery and peer through a hole high in the wall at the muddled multitude of written treasures beyond. Solomon marvelled at the confusion he beheld, unimaginable unless one had seen it.
Found within that confusion and elsewhere within the city, would be such items as a letter from Jerusalem to Fustat in which a man wrote of tensions with the addressee’s cousin, of ships burning in Sicily, and of sad news: the death of a woman who left behind a boy only two years old. “How terrible is our grief!” were the writer’s words. “It has destroyed us and sickened us.” Furthering the difficulties was some sort of government edict that prevented the burial. “We gave a bribe,” he wrote, “and brought her out at night.”
For the rest of the geniza story, we will continue after this short break.
…
As geniza researcher Ben Outhwaite has written, “The emergence of the Cairo Genizah from its dark Fustat storeroom has often been told as an exhilarating tale of late-Victorian derring-do, orientalist travelogue, and amazing serendipity.” But Solomon Schechter was not the first of his era to have that serendipitous look into the synagogue’s attic, or at least something like it. After all, those artifacts which Agnes and Maragaret had brought back, those materials which had so fascinated Solomon and driven him to journey all the way to Egypt in search of more, less of a trek from England than in our usual time period but still no casual outing, they had come from somewhere. That space he looked into had not always housed the geniza, and the story does not begin with Schechter or the Scottish twins.
There was Jacob Saphir, the ethnographer, writer, and traveller, born in present-day Belarus and ranging in his documented travels from Australia to Egypt. He was on the cusp of making Schechter’s discovery himself when he twice journeyed through Cairo, first as an emissary raising funds for the construction of a synagogue in Jerusalem and then increasingly as a scholar with an interest in examining ancient manuscripts and writing of the Jewish communities and synagogues that he visited. In 1858, he’d visited every synagogue in Cairo, and in old Fustat had walked the narrow streets to where the Ben Ezra Synagogue sat in disrepair, decades before Schechter would make his approach.
Saphir would return in 1864 and initially not be allowed access to the geniza there. He was told stories of a guardian serpent within, perhaps just ones intended to shoo away foreign visitors, perhaps just signals that a small gift might clear any such obstacle out of the way. It was something similar to the curse he’d been warned about on his previous visit, when the attendant had said he’d never himself, in his 20 years at the synagogue, been upstairs to see the scroll of Ezra, the one said to have been handwritten by the Biblical prophet, for anyone who did so would die that same year. Saphir, who was quite an accomplished examiner of ancient scrolls and manuscripts by this point, was not put off by such unpleasantries. About a month later, he returned.
“After I had laboured for two days and was covered with dust and earth, I removed a few folios of some old books and manuscripts that I had chosen, but I did not find any valuable information in them. Who knows what lies beneath?”
He had not, he reported, suffered from any “snake, or similar reptile … thank God,” he wrote, “no harm came to me.” He had come away a little unsatisfied, personal safety aside, but there was that note of possibility at the end. Who knew, and you might be wondering after two days of investigation, why he didn’t.
The reason lay in the fact that this was not an archive. There was no filing system at work, no way by which one might comfortably peruse the shelves and take in all that was on offer, no shelves at all for that matter. What you had were mounded written materials and mounded atop of them were the, quote, “boards, broken rafters, heaps of dust, stones and pebbles which cascaded from the roof when it fell in.” A rooftop opening was at that time the only point of access, the room otherwise having been sealed off, perhaps after the repairs for a 15th-century fire. At that opening was where tattered materials could be tossed down and where he attempted his explorations, the less interesting and more modern material likely closest to hand. No wonder he didn’t meet with much success.
He was denied access to the treasures below, the kind of valuable manuscripts which he sought, and the glorious scraps there among them. A note of congratulations on the opening of a perfumery, perhaps. A document detailing an accusation of slander, for which the accused was to be jailed and flogged but was set free with only a “loss of money.” A petition on the part of a widow living in a ruined apartment. She did not want to be moved, she said, for she liked hearing the prayers of the nearby synagogue, but the rent had been raised a full dirham and a half per month.
Those same conditions that Saphir faced may have prevented another man from making headway there in that Fustat synagogue, a scholar, archaeologist, and collector from what is now northwestern Ukraine by the name of Abraham Firkovich. He’d had an interest in such things ever since buying manuscripts from a Jerusalem synagogue’s geniza in 1830, had, about a decade later, found scrolls and codices hidden in the walls of a Crimean one.
Firkovich knew Saphir, had worked with him, had purchased from him some of his finds, and he was in Cairo at the same time as Saphir. He would, later that same year, make his own plans for entry, after Saphir’s rather unproductive one. He would send written word to his son to the effect that he was opening up the geniza and was going to “uncover it from below the dust.” There was mention even of various other genizot about the city, but perhaps due to financial difficulties, Firkovich’s ambitions were not to be realized.
Eluding him then were all sorts of treasures, such gems as the letter of an 11th-century Jerusalemite named Eli, a man who travels had taken him to Acre, Tyre, and then back to Ramla. "I was attacked by vomiting,” he wrote. “I exploded from above and below, over 300 times; everybody in the house gave me up. The doctors came on Saturday night and saw that I was finished and that there was nothing to be done any more. I made my will... [then improved]... but I still have terrible weakness."
Like our poor friend Eli, the geniza chamber was also in rough shape, prohibitively so, and so too was the entire building. In the decades that followed, visitors made mention of the scroll of Ezra, but nothing about the geniza. They made mention of the dire shape which the synagogue was in, some 1881 visitors seeing it “almost buried” by “a deposit of dirt about it.” Such degradation was an ongoing theme.
There is the possibility that someone or some ones did penetrate the geniza in these years of disrepair. There are documents that emerged, were collected and sold, that have been connected to the geniza, the sorts of things that would make their way eventually to people like Agnes and Margaret, but there’s some doubt as to whether they actually came from that particular synagogue. There were other genizot, other historic synagogues, other collections of such documents like the Bassatine Jewish Cemetery, which Solomon Schechter would also acquire items from, so the question of exactly how much came out of the Ben Ezra synagogue during these years is an open one.
But speaking of Schechter, you might be wondering how, given all this difficulty, given the crumbling condition of the geniza chamber itself and the synagogue in its entirety, along with all the adversity posed by these conditions, how did Schechter pop in for a visit from afar and scoop up such a wealth of documents. The short answer is that he was not entering the same chamber, not really, in a sense, the same synagogue.
In 1988, a man named Elkan Adler viewed the Ezra scroll there in the synagogue and was told there were no manuscripts of worth on the premises. He was told that “torn or defaced Hebrew prints and … Torah” were sometimes buried, but nothing of any importance or value. He also heard at that time that repairs were planned. When he returned in 1896, a year before Schechter’s visit, he found that the synagogue had been “restored out of all knowledge.” The new renovations were not well received by all.
“These wretches have demolished the most curious & interesting old building,” raged one response, but it sounds like the renovations were both badly needed and made faithful use of both the original layout and even, where possible, the old materials, “a reverent act of reinstallation rather than one of wanton destruction,” as Rebecca Jefferson has characterized it. Unfortunately, the treatment of the geniza and its precious contents was less laudable, and certainly less reverent.
There seems to have been no initial plan for dealing with those thousands upon thousands of written artifacts, that millennium of history, and when I say there was no plan, I mean that historical preservation was really not a concern and manuscripts were being tossed away and buried in the rubbish mounds, some of them to be dug up later.
A Reverend Chester was soon on the scene, writing in a letter that, quote, “A room has been laid open whose floor is literally covered with fragments of manuscripts and early printed Hebrew books and manuscripts of leather. … I only fear the lot will be destroyed or perhaps buried.” He could find no one who would tell him what would be done with them, but he did dig through the dust, fleas, and unsorted heaps to select some several hundred pieces, the price he negotiated, 19 pounds, the collection he came away with, much smaller but considerably less fragmentary than that which Schechter would later acquire. And others too, would make their way to the mid-renovation synagogue and come away with reading material.
Other buyers, agents, and dealers would be there, picking up bundles of manuscripts, scrolls, and scraps for very little cost. Writings were apparently left lying outside and exposed or taken to the cemetery at the time. In the words of one report, “The workmen on tearing down the roof dumped all the contents of this attic into the court-yard, and there the [manuscripts] were lying for several weeks in the open. During these weeks, many dealers could obtain bundles of leaves for a nominal sum.”
It was only after this lengthy period of renovation that the geniza was reinstalled, the one that Solomon Schechter would “discover.” Clearly the geniza he encountered was changed in character from the one which Jacob Saphir had tried to access. Much had been taken from it, a great bulk of manuscripts, countless sheets of vellum and paper trundled off, and Solomon, Agnes, and Margarat would spend time in the city doing what they could to acquire them. But also, the conditions had changed. Where earlier examiners had spoken in terms of a dry and dusty mess, what he found was moist and earthy.
There is talk of damp and dirt, of “sodden piles” of pages that were separated with difficulty, of the presence of “all possible insects,” of a certain unmistakable smell, all indications that at least some significant proportion of the materials had been buried and then dug from the soil. Everyone involved mentioned the poor, and distinctly wet, condition, and in addition, there was the possibility that the synagogue’s curators had added materials from other sources entirely to the new geniza, including, some rather suspected, all manner of worthless rubbish that was thrown in with a view to bulking out future sales, those curators perhaps having realized there was business to be done with this resource of theirs. Fortunately for us, the old medieval building and protective piles of debris had done an admirable job of preserving the older texts. This exposure to damaging elements, to the moisture and earth, was new, a product of that chaotic time of renovation, disturbance, burials, and excavation.
It won’t by this point surprise you to learn that the “Cairo Geniza” as a collection of sources is not really one collection. It’s scattered, a substantial portion at Cambridge under the name Taylor-Schechter, but other bodies of texts held elsewhere, by other colleges, institutions, and individuals. It’s also not really from one source, for it contains materials that were not found in the Ben Ezra synagogue, either pre or post-restoration, but rather in the cemetery, in other synagogues, in the ground itself, and in the hands of dealers in such things whose own sources are difficult now to know. Some fragments can be connected after the fact to ones known to have been at Ben Ezra, others not so, or not yet.
Still, as Ben Outhwaite puts it, “no other collection has had such a seductive effect. The unique combination of its immense size but remarkable, detailed intimacy gives the Cairo Genizah an exhilarating, neverending attraction, to the point of scholarly addiction.”
And you can see why.
Truly, a whole world opens up within the geniza collection: religious documents, state ones, and personal, tantalizing windows into lives both common and uncommon. Letters pouring into Fustat from Damascus or Jerusalem, trade with India, concern over events in Sicily. Receipts, reminders, familial remonstrance. Divorce and theological discussion. Frustration over the production of cheese, as to which one letter’s author wrote “I have already perished from the cheese and have become perplexed as to what I should do." Apologies for not having been better about travelling to see one’s mother, for which illness, the dangers of the road, and the price of renting an animal were all offered up by way of explanation. There is more there than I could do justice to with this one episode.
If you’re interested in dipping further into the world of the geniza yourself, there are the books of S.D. Goitein, exhaustive one would say if it were not for the ridiculous wealth of source material they could not entirely encompass. Or, for a more immediate way in, there’s the online Princeton Geniza Project. You can search for a topic that interests you or click the link to bring up a random fragment. You won’t find translations, transcriptions, or information for everything there, but there’s plenty for which you will. You won’t find the monstrously large 400,000 odd document Cairo geniza collection in its entirety, but the roughly ten percent that’s there is pretty hefty in itself and represents quite a lot to be getting on with, should you be so inclined.
I’ll very likely return to the geniza for future episodes, for there’s a lot of stories to tell within it, but as for the story of the geniza itself, I think I’ll leave it here.
Sources:
Goitein, S. D. A Mediterranean Society, Volume III: The Family. University of California Press, 1978.
Hoffman, Adina & Cole, Peter. Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza. Shocken Books, 2011.
Jefferson, Rebecca. The Cairo Genizah and the Age of Discovery in Egypt: The History and Provenance of a Jewish Archive. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.
Jefferson, Rebecca. "Deconstructing ‘the Cairo Genizah’: A Fresh Look at Genizah Manuscript Discoveries in Cairo before 1897." The Jewish Quarterly Review 108, no. 4 (2018): 422–48.
Lewis, Agnes Smith. Eastern Pilgrims: The Travels of Three Ladies. Hurst and Blackett, 1870.
Outhwaite, Ben. "A Hoard of Hebrew MSS," Limn issue 6, The Total Archive.
Reif, Stefan. A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo: The History of Cambridge University's Genizah Collection. Routledge, 2013.
Princeton Geniza Project. https://geniza.princeton.edu/en/