March 3, 2010

Hello Everyone,

Yesterday morning, Jacob and I boarded an airplane in Cairo. 17 hours later, having spent a couple of hours at London’s Heathrow Airport, we landed in Newark NJ, glad to be in the United States once again.

Our travel agent, having messed up our reservation in England, arranged for an upgrade here in New York. We’re staying in a HUGE, if somewhat dumpy, suite here at the Salisbury Hotel, right across the street from Carnegie Hall. We have lots of room here, so if you’re in the neighborhood, feel free to stop buy…and bring along your friends. If you have any trouble finding us, just ask anyone you meet how to get to Carnegie Hall. J

Meeting Rabbi Schechter

We were exhausted when we arrived, but there is no rest for the weary. For a late breakfast, we met with Rabbi John Schechter, the great-grandson of Rabbi Solomon Schechter, who discovered the Genizah. John’s true claim to fame, however, is that he was my camp counselor in Wisconsin in 1976 and/or 1977 – we confirmed it today.

We had a delightful time with Rabbi Schechter – he brought us over to the Jewish Theological Seminary, and showed us a display of Schechter family Judaica given to Solomon when he left Cambridge for New York in 1902. He also told us about Schechter’s daughter, Ruth, who married, moved to South Africa, later divorced her husband, returned to the US, and then remarried a man from Liverpool whom she had met in South Africa. A few years ago, John came across a novel written by Solomon Schechter’s friend, Israel Zangwill. It was about a Jewish woman from England who married, moved to South Africa, later divorced her husband, returned to the US, and then remarried a man from Liverpool whom she had met in South Africa. One might think that Zangwill based the novel on the events in Ruth’s life, but Zangwill wrote the book when Ruth was only a little girl! Somehow, it seems, Ruth internalized the story that Zangwill wrote, and then lived it out when she became an adult.

We met Rabbi Schechter at Tom’s Restaurant, of Seinfeld fame. For Jacob, it was a great surprise.

Moving South

Then, we took a quick cab ride from the upper Manhattan Campus of JTS, to the Greenwich Village home of the Hebrew Union College. There we met with Dr. Lawrence Hoffman, one of the Reform movement’s leading scholars of Jewish Liturgy, and a member of the team that composed our movement’s new prayerbook, Mishkan Tefillah. We had a fascinating conversation with him about what we can learn from the liturgical material in the Genizah.

My Movie Debut

Shortly before 5:00, we arrived at the office of Michael Strong, a literary agent who is producing the DVD Documentary version of the book. There, we spent six hours transferring images from my computer to his, setting up lights, doing my makeup (!), and conducting interviews about the project. I was exhausted by the time we left at around 11 PM, and Jacob was beyond exhausted. But he kept his spirits up the whole time, and was a real trooper.

Tomorrow…

Tomorrow we do interviews and more filming at JTS, and then we hop aboard a train for the hour-long ride to Bay Shore (on Long Island), where I am scheduled to speak about my trip – Mike will be filming my talk.

Now it’s almost 12:30 AM. Time to plotz. This has been a great trip, but I miss my wife and my other kids, and I am looking forward to coming home soon.

Shalom,

Rabbi Mark Glickman

Genizah Update #12

Day 10: Cairo Wrap-up

March 1, 2010

Hi Everyone,

CORRECTIONS AND CLARIFICATIONS

I apologize. Yesterday’s excitement, the pressure of limited Internet access, and my overall klutziness all led to several mistakes and omissions in yesterday’s email. Please allow me to correct them.

1. Yesterday’s update was #11, not #12 as it was labeled. In the future, I’ll be more careful in my pasting.

2. My fear of failure here in Cairo was that I would lay a big “goose-egg” –n ot a “good egg,” as I indicated in yesterday’s update. In fact, the only eggs that I ever lay are of the goose variety.

3. To clarify, because of the 15-foot abyss between the entry to the Genizah and its floor, I did not fully enter the chamber – doing so would have been very dangerous. I did, however, stick my head into the Genizah, which itself was an achievement I considered a huge success.

4. After I sent yesterday’s update, I realized that I’d neglected to mention just what it was that I saw in the Genizah. The answer: SALT. The Genizah is empty; Solomon Schechter removed most of its documents its documents in 1897, and a man named Jacques Mosseri removed the remaining ones in 1911. The floor of the Genizah bore a coat of dusty, gravelly schmutz, and the chamber’s only contents were two large bags labeled “SALT.”

Why were there bags of salt in the Genizah? This, my friends, is a good question – one that is likely to remain a mystery for a long time to come.

5. It is, I believe, important to note that Jacob Glickman is the first person to have photographed the inside of the Cairo Genizah – ever.

6. Today I learned that the dilapidated tomb we visited yesterday was that of Rabbi Chaim Kapuchi, a 16^th century mystic who lived here in Cairo. According to legend, the rabbi went blind at one point, but, when he continued to read from the Torah anyway, he miraculously regained his vision. After his death, many people suffering from ophthalmic diseases or blindness visited his grave in search of healing.

TODAY – OUR FINAL DAY IN CAIRO

This morning we toured Azbekiyyah Garden and its environs. Once a grand, Paris-style park, the Azbekiyyah has now fallen into ruin. The opera, Aida, premiered at the nearby Opera House in the 1890’s, and Solomon Schechter stayed across the street during his historic visit.

We lunched with Jere Bacharach and Barbara Fudge. They split their time between Cairo and Seattle, and have been very helpful in the planning of our trip.

Then, this afternoon, we were privileged to meet two prominent Muslim Genizah scholars. One was Professor Hassanein Rabie, an economic historian of Medieval Islam, and a former Vice President of Cairo University. The other was Dr. Mohamed Hawary, a professor of Hebrew Studies at Ain Shams university. Courageously, Dr. Hawary has publicly reached out to the Jewish community in many ways, striving to bridge the chasm that often separates Jews and Muslims.

The opportunity to meet each of these men was a real honor.

TOMORROW: EXODUS

Tomorrow morning, thanks to the miracle of manned flight rather than that of parted waters, Jacob and I make our exodus from Egypt. From here we head to the land of our people – New York.

We will continue to keep you updated, and we thank you for your continued interest.

Shalom,

Rabbi Mark Glickman

Genizah Update #10

Expedition Genizah Day 9 – Genizah!

We made it!!! Today, my son Jacob and I became the first people in decades to visit the Genizah chamber at Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue in many years. It was an unspeakable thrill, an enormous relief, and an experience that we both will treasure forever.

It was a dizzying day. I should preface my account, however, by noting that, when I began this trip, I had secured permission to visit the Cairo Genizah, but it was far from certain that I’d be able to visit it. Friends who know Egypt warned me never to count on anything here – my experience could end up succeeding beyond my wildest dreams, or I could come away with a big good-egg. One friend noted, “People come here counting on accomplishing all kinds of great things, and Egypt laughs.”

Today, Egypt didn’t laugh. Today, she was very cooperative.

THE BEN EZRA SYNAGOGUE

I was scheduled to meet Mr. Gamal Moustafa, of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, at the Ben Ezra Synagogue at 10:00 AM. We arrived early, and one of his assistants was already there. We began taking pictures, and soon Mr. Moustafa arrived. He is a man of about fifty or so; he’s about six feet tall, and today he wore a stylish sport jacket and crisply pressed slacks. He carried an air authority, and when he spoke, things seemed to happen very quickly. Soon, other staff members joined our party. “Dad,” Jacob said, “we’ve got a posse!”

It turns out that Mr. Moustafa is in charge of restoration of all Jewish, Coptic and Muslim religious sites for the Supreme Council. As began examining the synagogue, he explained that the Genizah is ordinarily off limits, and that this was an unusual visit. He had worked at his current post for fifteen years, and during that time, nobody – nobody – had ever entered the chamber. He had never even seen it, himself. (Actually, the last reported visit that I know of was in 1911.)

Eventually, we made our way up to the women’s balcony, from which we could get access to the Genizah. Mr. Moustafa said something in Arabic, and soon a six-foot ladder appeared – the kind that opens like an inverted V and stands on four legs. The attendants stood it in front of the entrance to the Genizah, held it steady, and invited me to climb. When I got to the top rung, the bottom threshold of the Genizah was at the level of my upper chest. I looked inside, and saw…nothing. It was dark. Pitch black.

“Can I go inside?” I asked.

“Yes. Can you jump up?”

Now, I like to think of myself as being pretty spry, but this was pushing it a little. To do what he was suggesting, I would have had to put my hands on the bottom of the Genizah entryway, jump with my legs, push with my arms, and somehow swing a leg into the opening…all in one smooth movement. I’m 46 years-old, I could stand to lose a few pounds – OK, a few dozen – I was on the balcony of a medieval synagogue, standing on a rickety ladder that was being held by a man I didn’t know and whose language I didn’t speak. On the other hand, I’ve been working on this project for a few years now, and I wasn’t about to let mere wimpiness prevent the completion of my mission. I decided I was going to give it a go.

“And please,” Mr. Moustafa added, “when you jump up, please don’t let your legs touch the wall in front of you.” Conservators had carefully restored and repainted that wall a few years ago, and, understandably, Mr. Moustafa didn’t want to ruin it with rabbinic scuffmarks.

At that moment, my decision to give it a go…up and went. “Uh…do you have a bigger ladder?”

Mr. Moustafa nodded to another attendant, who ran off to find one. Just then, I remembered that I had a tiny little flashlight on a keychain in my pocket. Careful so as not slip and fall, I reached in, removed it from my pocket, pressed the little button, and pointed the light inside the Genizah.

I’d always imagined that the Genizah floor was just a foot or two beneath the entryway. But when I shined the light down, I was surprised to see that the floor I’d expected to see simply didn’t exist. In fact, there was no floor.

Ok, so there was a floor, but it was down about fifteen feet or so beneath where I’d expected to find it. Had I just jumped in as Mr. Moustafa suggested – and as I’d seriously considered doing, myself – I would have plummeted downward to certain injury and, possibly, to my death.

What a story that would have made!

After a few moments, the other ladder arrived, and the attendants rigged a brighter light for me to use. The Genizah is a high chamber – maybe 30 feet or so – and it measures, I’m guessing, 10-by-12 feet. Afterward, the attendants showed me a small window near the bottom from which documents could be removed for burial. I called it “the Genizah drain.” For most of the Genizah’s active life, I believe, that drain was plugged shut.

During the Middle Ages, the Nile ran very near the synagogue building – it’s course has since shifted a few hundred yard to the west. Behind the building is the site where, according to tradition, the basket carrying the baby Moses was removed from the Nile.

As we thanked Mr. Moustafa, he asked whether there was anything else that we wanted to see. In fact, there was.

THE BASSATIN CEMETERY

Inez (our guide), Abd el-Aziz (our driver), Jacob, and I climbed into our van. But our party had grown, and now along with us were a Supreme Council staff member, a man whom I later learned was a police minder, and a Ben Ezra attendant “to tell us how to get there.” Our destination was the Bassatin Cemetery, the old burial-place of Cairo’s Jews, and also the site where Solomon Schechter and others found some Genizah documents.

The Bassatin Cemetery is, let’s just say, not on the typical Cairo tourist itinerary. To get there, we drove through crowded markets whose alleyways were barely wide enough for the van, desolate slums whose streets were lined with drifts of blowing trash, and past huge “cities of the dead” - gigantic Islamic cemeteries that have the look of neighborhoods themselves.

Finally, we arrived at the Jewish cemetery. But we weren’t allowed to enter – only relatives of the deceased were allowed. It turns out, however, that the Cairo Jewish cemetery consists of three different sections, so off we went to section #2. An old man – a caretaker from section #1 – climbed into our van to show us the way. That van was getting very crowded.

At section #2, we entered through a rickety gate, and found ourselves in a trash-strewn yard at the front of which, on rotting couch, sat a toothless old woman drinking tea. Behind her was a dilapidated mausoleum. It too was filled with trash, its floor was coated with animal droppings, and two roosters pecked and crowed in-and amongst-the debris.

This was the tomb of a prominent rabbi. His name escapes me in the swirl, so I’ll have to check. Its condition was very sad, indeed.

Then, at cemetery #3, we finally found what we were looking for. This was the Mosseri family burial ground. This wealthy family had built several elaborate museums around the periphery of the cemetery, and in the center were the graves of hundreds of other members of the community – non-Mosseris.

It is difficult to describe the condition of this place. Most of the headstones are toppled, and the inscriptions of many have been chisled away. Thieves? Antisemites? It’s unclear. The mausoleums are mostly for people who died in the early to mid 20^th century. They, too, are dilapidated – filled with animal droppings, trash. A shelf in one of them held several dozen stale, rotting, pita breads.

Garbage swirled in the wind at every turn. Wild dogs howled and defecated amidst the graves in the distance.

Before we left, Jacob remembered a grave we had seen when we first arrived. “Dad, could we stand up that headstone with the Jewish star?” He drafted some members of our “team” to help, and together they righted the fallen headstone of one of Cairo’s deceased Jews. I was very proud of him.

The Maimonides Synagogue

Needless to say, it was a relief to leave the cemetery, and head toward our next stop – the Maimonides Synagogue. This place of worship was originally built in the 19^th century, above the site of the yeshiva where the great Rabbi Moshe Ben Maimon once taught his students. The Egyptian government has just restored the synagogue, and it will be rededicated a week from now, on March 7^th.

Our driver took us to the old, walled city of Fatimid Cairo, the Medieval capital of the city. The gates are ordinarily closed to traffic, but Mr. Moustafa had told the police we were coming, so they opened the gates and waved us in. Just inside, we left the van, and climbed onto an electric cart, which took our party through the narrow winding alleyways of old Cairo to within a hundred yards or so of the Maimonides synagogue.

There, the head conservator, Ayman Hamed, gave us the grand tour, showing us the beautifully restored 19^th century synagogue, the yeshiva beneath it, the small chamber off the yeshiva which is said to be Maimonides’ original burial place, and much more. It was a real thrill.

Then, it was back to the hotel. Jacob was exhausted, and I had to awaken him to get out of the van when we arrived.

Looking Ahead

Tomorrow, we have several meetings with scholars and friends, and then, early the next morning, off to New York!

And here I am, still trying to make sense of it all.

Thanks for reading this far, and best wishes to you all,

Mark Glickman

Genizah Update # 10

Expedition Genizah Day 6: Cairo

The Glickmans are in Egypt Land…and what a change it is from Cambridge!

We arrived at the Cairo Airport late yesterday afternoon, where we met Ayman, a transfer agent who drove us to our hotel along a serpentine route of superhighways, narrow alleys and everything in0between. He explained that, the day before, there had been torrential rain and hailstorms in Cairo, causing extensive flooding throughout the city. The weather has turned pleasant, but we can still see small remnants of floods everywhere.

We’re staying the Cairo Sheraton, at a palatial hotel festooned everywhere with mirrors and faux gold.

[Oh…as I type this, it is time for one of the five daily Muslim worship services, and we can hear the blast of the muezzin’s voice calling everyone to prayer. “Allahu Akhbar….” I don’t think there will be much of a problem getting a minyan.]

Anyway, the hotel is beautiful, and our large room features a panoramic view of the Nile and a huge swath of Cairo. The security here is very tight. Every car pulling up to the hotel gets sniffed by a bomb-sniffing dog, and everyone who enters does so through a metal-detector.

Today, along with our guide, Inez, and our driver, Zizu, we got a good sense of old Cairo. The Cairo of antiquity. The Cairo whose physical remains were here when Solomon Schechter arrived in 1896, and also during the lives of the Genizah people during the Middle Ages. We went to the Egyptian Museum, the Pyramids, and the Sphinx, thus taking in a good 4,000-5,000 years of history in one day.

The Egyptian Museum is home to more than 250,000 antiquities. Some of these items come from temples, of course, but most come from ancient tombs. We saw King Tut’s gleaming mask, dozens of mummies (including that of the female ruler, Hatshepsut), and more royal statues and Pharaohonic paraphernalia than I could ever recount.

Through it all, I was struck by how obsessed ancient Egypt seems to have been with death. It created all of this grandeur and opulence to ensure its kings safe passage into the next world. The Pyramids, the Sphinx, the mummies, and so much of the rest of it were not for the living, but rather for the welfare of the dead. When I shared this observation with Inez, she corrected me. What we saw today, she said, was not a culture obsessed with death; it was a culture that, instead, was focused on eternal life.

Still, what a remarkable contrast there is between the ancient Egypt of sphinxes and pyramids, and the medieval Jewish culture of the Genizah that I’ll visit tomorrow. What remains of the Genizah people were not massive tombs and huge statues, but a pile of old scraps, instead. In those scraps, we read of life in this world not the next – we read of trade, marriage, divorce, schools, poverty, lawsuits, and much, much more. We read, in short, of the stuff of this life, this world, and this quite knowable reality.

That’s an oversimplification, of course, but not much of one. The Egypt of the antiquity is of the Great Beyond. The Egypt of the Genizah is of the Here and Now. Or at least of the here and now as experienced by the Jews of Medieval Cairo.

It is to that room – the Genizah chamber at the Ben Ezra Synagogue – that I plan to climb tomorrow. It is a moment that I have been looking to with eager anticipation for many months, and I look forward to telling you how it goes.

Shalom,

Rabbi Mark Glickman

Genizah Update #9

Expedition Genizah Day 6: Cambridge Today, Cairo Tomorrow

Hello everyone!

Today is our last full day in Cambridge, and I wanted to get a final update out to you before we leave for Cairo tomorrow. Since including the pictures was such a hassle last time, I’m going to omit them from this email, hoping to convey the images to you through words, instead.

The past two days have been a real whirlwind. I’ll have more detailed reports when we get home, but here are a few highlights:

Day 5: Old Hebrew and Old Houses

Yesterday began back at the Genizah unit, where we planned to film an interview with its director, Dr. Ben Outhwaite. One member of our team, however (I won’t tell you who), forgot to bring a fresh battery for the camera. If Ben weren’t such a sweet guy and so willing to postpone the interview, it would have been a problem.

We zipped back to the hotel, grabbed the battery, and then went to meet with Dr. Geoffry Khan, a linguist who has done a lot of work in Genizah studies. He is, for example, the world’s leading expert on the Hebrew vowel, sh’va. One his many Genizah-related projects has been to use the manuscripts to reconstruct the way Medieval Jews pronounced Hebrew, which is very different from any modern Hebrew that I’ve ever heard. We have some video of him reading the first couple verses of Genesis in that Medieval Tiberian Hebrew dialect - it’s very cool.

We then went to the home of Sue Pearl, a delightful woman I’d met the day before when I spoke to the Cambridge Jewish Residents Association. Sue is a sculptor, and she lives in the house where Solomon Schechter first lived with his wife, children, and two servants when he moved to Cambridge in 1890. The house is a cozy place, and Sue gave it a very welcoming feel. It was fun trying to imagining Schechter living there.

Solomon Schechter had left that house by the time he first became involved in Genizah work, but Sue was kind enough to drive us over to Schechter house #2. This time, I didn’t know the occupants, but I mustered my chutzpah and knocked on the door anyway. A young man answered my knock. I explained why I was there, and he told me that his parents own the house, but that they were out of town. He said we could come in anyway, and he let us take some pictures. His father, it turns out, is a physician and an amateur painter. I don’t think Schechter would have used all of the modern art and furniture that this family does, but, again, it was fun to imagine the house as it might have been back in Schechter-times.

Day 6: Castlebrae

Today we began at Castlebrae, the 20-room mansion where Solomon Schechter first became aware of the riches of the Cairo Genizah. The beautiful, Tudor-style house was home to Margaret Gibson and Agnes Lewis, two wealthy and erudite identical-twin Scottswomen, who were collectors and scholars of ancient and medieval manuscripts. On May 13^th, 1897, in the Castlebrae dining room, they showed some newly-purchased antiquarian manuscripts to Solomon Schechter, and Schechter identified one of them as a page from the long-lost book of Ben Sirah (this was one of the pages Jacob and I held yesterday). Today, Castlebrae is a student dormitory for the students of Clare College, part of Cambridge University.

Arriving at Castlebrae this morning, we were greeted by our tour guide, Charlie Hampton, who is the head porter (security officer and all-‘round overseer) of Clare College. Charlie is a burly, balding and very feisty man of about 70 or so. He has a delightful, crooked smile, and that wonderful f British accent that makes T’s into apostrophes. Also joining us were three members of the Clare College staff, and Dr. Janet Soskice, who recently published a marvelous book about Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson, called The Sisters of Sinai. Dr. Soskice is a very dignified and articulate woman, around 60 years old, who showed up Cambridge-style – on an upright bicycle with a large wicker basket on the front handlebars.

The rooms of Castlebrae have been chopped and redivided since the sisters lived there, but you can still get a sense of its grandeur. The dining room where they showed Schechter the Genizah documents, for example, is now the office of Terry Staton, the “supervisor” of Clare college, which I think is something of a cross between college advisor and director of student affairs.

At one point, I asked Terry, “Are you aware of the great historic events that unfolded right here in your office?” As I told her the story, a student approached her desk, waited for me to finish, and then asked a question of her own: “Terry, do you by any chance have my have my trousers?”

Charlie used his keys to let us into the students’ dorm rooms, some of which still held the original furniture from the 1890s – heavy oak stuff now draped with 21^st century rock posters and silly photographs. Near the end of the tour, we were in the main hallway off the foyer, and we came to a large cabinet with a high, arched top. It was locked. Charlie couldn’t find the key, and told us that he had worked there for over 20 years, and had never gone into that cabinet. Our little group stood around wondering what great secrets we might find if we could get into that cabinet, and then we began to walk away.

As I left, I turned around and saw Jacob – my innocent little boy – reach into his pocket, pull out his old student ID, and slide it into the door jamb. Within about five seconds, Jacob had picked the lock and was opening the door. The group froze, turned in its tracks, and hurried back. Slowly, Jacob opened the large door. Slowly, we peered inside. And slowly, we realized that the cabinet held….

Nothing. It was just some old shelves, and a dated inventory from 1966 on the inside of the door listing sheets, napkins and tablecloths. Dr. Soskice guesses that Samuel Lewis, Agnes’ husband who died a few years after the house was built, may have used the cabinet to display his collections of ancient coins and pottery.

From there, it was back to the Clare College Library for tea. There we met Aaron (oops forgot to record his last name) an American Jewish graduate student in Classics, and nephew of David Bolnick, a mohel in Seattle with whom I have worked several times. Aaron walked us over to the Great Hall of Clare College – the dining room. The room had high, vaulted ceilings and magnificent portraits of some early enemies of our USA – General Cornwallis, Charles Townshend, etc.

The whole thing was very Hogwarts.

Ordinarily, I would share some thoughtful observations or comments at this point, concisely – maybe even pithily – summing up my experiences here. But by head is spinning with all that I’ve been seeing, and I am still processing. Pithy comments, I’m afraid, will have to wait.

Tomorrow, Back to Egypt

Tombi the driver is to meet us at 5:00 AM tomorrow to drive us to Heathrow for our 9:15 flight. Two days later, we visit the Genizah and make our “Climb Through Time.”

As I anticipate that visit, I’ve been trying to think of what I should say when I first set foot in that little room – I’ve been looking for a “One small step for man…” comment that would be fitting for the moment. Here are a few of the lines I’m considering:

· Ooh…look at all the Pez Dispensers up here! I never knew there was a Maimonides one!

· So this is where President Carter’s family stored all those un-bought cans of Billy Beer!

· Capone this…Capone that…Hey, Jacob – call Geraldo!

· Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?

· Gee, Starbucks stores really are everywhere these days!

Somehow, I don’t think that any of these would do. Your thoughts and suggestions, as always, would be most welcome.

Thank you so much for your interest in – and support of – this project. About 150 people now receive these emails, and your interest in, and enthusiasm for, this project inspires me beyond words. I am very, very grateful to you all.

Shalom,

Rabbi Mark Glickman

PS. A CORRECTION: In a previous update, I mentioned that I’d met Lady Marilyn Fersht, whose husband, Sir Alan Fersht, is a leading scientist involved in the Human Genome Project. In reality, however, Sir Fersht is not involved in the Human Genome Project. His expertise is in the field of proteins, and his connection with genetics is that his lab is next door to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology, where Francis Crick and James Watson discovered DNA. I apologize for the mistake.

Genizah Update # 8...Actually, Just Pictures from #7

February 23, 2010

Hello Everyone,

Boy, did I have computer problems last night. I spent about 2 hours trying to figure out how to send that last update, and finally succeeded…or so I thought. Unfortunately, I included about 10 pictures in that email, but I discovered today that they didn’t come through. This probably made much of my email sound senseless.

Some descriptions of the above attachements:

· Tombi was the guide waiting for us at the airport. As I said in last night’s email, despite what his large nametag says, this is a picture of him, not me,

· Chapel and Towers are pictures of some sights we saw in Cambridge

· Primer, Ben Sirah, and David to Moses are three documents Jacob and I held yesterday – the first is a children’s book, the second was the first document that opened Solomon Schechters’ eyes to the value of the Genizah (a page from a long-lost biblica-erea book), and the third was the final letter that the great thinker, Moses Maimonides, ever received from his brother David before David was lost at sea.

I hope these come through this time.

Off to work now,

Mark

Genizah Update #7
Expedition Genizah, Day 4 - Cambridge!

Hello Everyone,

I am pleased to report that expedition Genizah is well underway, and so far it’s been a huge success.

Here are some highlights:

Day 1, February 20 – Travel

Seattle to Washington DC; Washington to London. Cab from Heathrow to Cambridge. Our driver was a very nice man from Sri Lanka named Tombi:




Contrary to what his large nametag says, this is a picture of Tombi, not me.

Except for a snafu with our hotel reservation that took several phone calls and emails to fix, everything went smoothly. We are now cozily ensconced at the University Arms Hotel, in a room overlooking the field where the rules of modern soccer…uh…football were invented. The hotel also boasts the last surviving cage elevator in operation – it was installed in the 1920’s by Mr. Waygood Otis, himself.

Day 2: Sunday, February 21 – Arrival

By the time we settled in at the hotel, it was mid afternoon. We were tired, of course, and very hungry. We grabbed a bite to eat at a very British restaurant. (OK, it was Italian…and Jacob ordered a hamburger. But it was in England, so at some leve it had to be British, right?)

Then, we walked around town. Cambridge a beautiful and very European city of winding streets, narrow sidewalks, and breathtaking Gothic arches and spires. The town itself dates back to Roman times, and its university is over 800 years old. It is common to find oneself squeezing between a gray brick wall and pedestrian traffic on a sidewalk, and then to pass an archway through which is the gorgeous green quadrangle of one of the university colleges, surrounded by 16th century chapels and classroom buildings.


My research made me familiar with the city even before my arrival. I had visited it often via Google Earth (sorry, Microsoft folks), and I was surprised to discover that I already knew my way around pretty well. Jacob and I checked out some of the old colleges, crossed the River Cam (over the Cam-bridge, of course) and took a peak at Castlebrae, the home of Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, where Solomon Schechter first began to feel the lure of the Genizah. Thursday, we get a proper tour of the place.

Then, we went to a pub for fish-n-chips, came home, and plotzed. It was 8 PM.


Day 3: Monday, February 22nd – The University Library

We awoke promptly at 3:30 AM, which gave us plenty of time to prepare for breakfast at 7:30 and our appointment at the library at 9:40. It was snowing.

Arrival:
First, we had to visit the library’s office of admissions to show our letters of introduction and file the appropriate paperwork. The woman who greeted us – Jacob dubbed her “Mrs. Frumpy McGee” – put up some age-related hurdles regarding Jacob’s entrance into to the library, but after a few harrumphs and several phone calls it all worked out. Her face has been the only non-smiling one we’ve seen since our arrival.

Soon, Dr. Ben Outhwaite, director of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah research unit came to greet us. He escorted us to his office through a complex series of narrow hallways, dark library stacks, and reading rooms with arched windows and high vaulted ceilings. Along the way he explained that the University Library owns a copy of every English book printed in the United Kingdom since…since…I forget, but since a long time ago. It also has countless periodicals, manuscripts, and even a Genizah fragment or two.

The Genizah Unit is much smaller than I’d anticipated – it’s really just a reception room with three small offices attached to it. Working with Dr. Outhwaite and his assistant that day were:

• A German Ph.D. student researching Arabic bible translations
• Another scholar who was cataloging Cambridge’s collection of more than 193,000 Genizah manuscripts. Dr. Ernst Worman began that work in 1904, and continued until his untimely death in 1909. Now, after more than a century, the work has finally resumed.
• Dr. Shmuel Glick, director of the Schocken Institute, in Jerusalem, who was visiting Genizah Unit to research some response literature.

Ben Outhwaite is a very affable guy. He has a terrific sense of humor, he’s a very talented scholar, and Jacob and I were both drawn to him immediately. He showed us some albums of 800-1000 year-old manuscripts that he and the other scholars had been working on that day.

Then he brought us to the imaging department. There, a team of the University Library’s photo technicians are working diligently with very resolution scanners and cameras to capture high quality images of the Genizah manuscripts. They photograph about 200 pictures per-person-per-day – a total of 2,500-3,000 per week.

We then went to the conservation lab, where the staff is processing the Mosseri collection – an assortment of about 7000 documents recently given to Cambridge as a long-term loan. In 20 years, they will go to the Jewish National Library, in Jerusalem. One of the technicians explained how she painstakingly cleans, flattens, and repairs each manuscript, spending about an hour to an hour-and-a-half on each one. She works on several documents simultaneously, however, so she can conserve 4-10 of them per day.

Talking to another conservator, I marveled at how painstaking their work must be. She responded by saying, “Everyone has patience for something. We all have something that we can do meticulously. For some people it’s raising kids; for others it’s playing music; for us, it’s repairing old documents.”

Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take any photographs inside the library, but their staff will be taking some for us, and we’ll be able to share the pictures when we receive them during the next couple of weeks.


Day 4: Seeing the Documents, Viewing the Stacks, Meeting the Jews

Seeing the Documents:

I’d asked Ben whether we could see several documents of particular interest, and today we got to see them. Among the treasures we saw were:

• Several of Maimonides’ documents written out by hand by the sage himself:



• The last letter Maimonides’ younger brother ever wrote to him before being lost at sea:



• Old palimpsests – medieval documents written on even older sheets of parchment and paper. Both layers of text are visible. In one the top text is from the 10th century CE, the under-text is from the 7th century CE:



• The Damascus Document – an early copy of one of the Dead Sea Scrolls:




• One of the oldest known pieces of Jewish sheet music in the world:

• A collection of schoolbooks, including some doodles and writing exercises written by children during the Middle Ages:



• A page of the original Hebrew of the book of Ben Sirah – this was the manuscript that Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson showed Solomon Schechter that first inspired him to visit the Genizah:

• The letter that Solomon Schechter wrote to Mrs. Lewis after he had confirmed his Ben Sirah find:


• And many, many more.

Jacob and I both had the privilege of holding each of these documents in our own hands. It was an unspeakable thrill.

Viewing the Stacks:

Ben then did some finagling and arranged to lead us into the stacks where the library stores its Genizah collection. We saw two or three long rows of library shelves that were linedfloor to ceiling, with albums holding the Genizah documents. Other, larger documents were stored in wide, flat-drawered cabinets. There was also a crate holding thousands of “manuscript crumbs,” tiny pieces of paper and vellum that had crumbled off their original pages over the years. Genizah gravel.

Along the way, we passed the Darwin aisle, where Charles Darwin’s papers are stored, including the original copies of his diaries from the Beagle expedition. Not far, we knew, were the papers of Sir Isaac Newton. Many other recognizable names whizzed by my eyes, but my brain is so overloaded that I can’t remember them.

Meeting the Jews:

If all of that weren’t enough, we then had a special treat. We left the library, and were picked up by Sara Kemp. Sara grew up in Cairo, moved to Israel just before that country’s revolution in the 1950’s, and, for the past several years, has lived in Cambridge. She has transcribed many Genizah documents, and was a HUGE help to me in planning my trip.

Sarah brought us to her home, where I spoke about my project to some members of the Cambridge Jewish Residents Association. About 20-25 people attended, most were seniors, and the vast majority were women – they were a delightful group, and they were all so British! Jacob and I both had a terrific time.

The president of this group, by the way, is Lady Marilyn Fersht, whose husband, Sir Alan Fersht, is a leading biologist involved in the Human Genome Project. Afterwards, I noted that, in the US, she and Michelle Obama might very easily been confused with one another – one is Lady Fersht, and the other is the First Lady. (Sorry.)

Looking Ahead:

Tomorrow we meet a leading philologist of Semitic languages who has done extensive Genizah work, and we visit a former home of Solomon Schechter. Thursday, we meet a Maimonides scholar, tour Castlebrae, and take more photos and videos for the documentary version of the book, and on Friday we get in a cab at 5:00 AM and head to Cairo. (Along the way, we’ll board an airplane, too.)

An adventure this trip truly iss; a vacation it ain’t!

Thanks for reading this far. More updates coming soon.

Shalom,

Rabbi Mark Glickman