Sacred Trash (28 page)
Authors: Adina Hoffman
And so it is that we can look over Halfon ben Netanel’s shoulder as, in September of 1140, in Fustat, he receives a letter from a relative in Alexandria announcing the imminent arrival from Spain of “the Sultan’s new ship,” which was carrying HaLevi and had dropped anchor in Alexandria’s harbor on Sunday the eighth. A short while later HaLevi himself writes Halfon and tells him of the warm embrace he’d received in Alexandria, a reception that was to his mind
too
enthusiastic; it embarrassed him. The ever-gracious HaLevi played along, as he did for so much of his time in that city, but his mind was elsewhere:
Outwardly I participated [in the festivities], but inwardly it all weighed on me heavily. This is not what I’ve come for, and in fact I desired the opposite—solitude and retreat—as I am close to being like one who waits for death at any moment. However, as you know, my natural disposition will not allow me anything but to accept the kindness of those who mean well, and to greet them in friendship.
Within a few weeks, however, things in Alexandria grow sticky for the superstar poet, as jealousy festers all around him and gives rise to misunderstanding and considerable grumbling. By September 23 an Alexandrian Jewish colleague of Halfon (who is still at home for the holiday season) writes with a report of HaLevi’s time and trials in the city, saying plainly that he’s amazed Halfon has allowed things to get so out of
hand in his absence; one frustrated would-be host had gone so far as to involve the local police in applying pressure to lure the celebrated guest to his home. The colleague asks Halfon to make his way to Alexandria at once “to put an end to this headache.”
The trail resumes several months later, after Halfon has heeded his colleague’s call, plucked HaLevi out of the Alexandrian spider’s web, and taken him personally to Fustat. In early 1141, a new and apparently overeager and possessive Alexandrian friend of the poet, Abu Ala, writes HaLevi directly to say that his visit to the city has left behind a noxious cloud. It seems that some of the poems HaLevi had written in honor of his Alexandrian host were being circulated in the city by that host, as a kind of self-aggrandizing commemorative collection, and members of the community were muttering about the great poet’s hypocrisy. How could a devout man on a religious pilgrimage be writing frivolous verse about fountains and chickens, and paeans to patrons (which HaLevi had been improvising, no doubt as gestures of gratitude)? Abu Ala goes on to ask if HaLevi is aware that he had, however unintentionally, offended people by turning down invitations from some and accepting them from others. All this, Abu Ala hastens to make clear, he is reporting out of “affection … and concern for your dignity (may it ever be great).” Above the Judeo-Arabic letter Abu Ala writes in Arabic characters,
“Burn after reading!”
On May 11 of the same year, 1141, we hear that HaLevi—having barely
survived a close scrape with the local Muslim religious authorities—is aboard an “oversized nutshell” of a boat, waiting to complete his journey to Palestine. “The ships bound for al-Andalus, Tripoli, Sicily and Byzantium, and other points East,” writes one of his friends, “have found a good wind and departed.” HaLevi, however, has been waiting on deck for four full days. Finally, on Monday, May 19, a partially torn fragment reports that “Our Master Yehuda HaLevi sailed on Wednesday.” The wind had shifted.
That laconic word turns out to be the last sighting of the poet. Three months later a Hebrew letter is dispatched from Fustat to Damascus containing several hard-to-decipher lines that mention “our Master, Yehuda HaLevi, the pious and righteous man”; using a locution employed for the dead, it adds: “the memory of a saint is a blessing.” At this point the manuscript is corrupt, though a glancing reference to the “gates of Jerusalem” follows. In any event, a legend arose according to which HaLevi was killed there by a Saracen on horseback—unlikely as that might have been, given that the holy city was under Crusader rule at the time and off-limits to both Muslims and Jews. (Testimony from this period does indicate, however, that modest pilgrimages to Jerusalem were made by Jews, who would pray on the Mount of Olives, outside the city, overlooking the site of the Temple Mount.)
HaLevi’s celebrity notwithstanding, we know nothing for certain about his life after he left the harbor at Alexandria. There is reasonably convincing evidence that he survived the ten-day journey to (most likely) the Crusader port of Acre, at some point set out for Jerusalem, and that he died between June 8 and August 5, 1141, some two months after arriving in Palestine. Perhaps further particulars of this final chapter of HaLevi’s life will someday surface. For now, we’re fortunate to have between covers this almost implausibly tactile account of the penultimate chapter in HaLevi’s life, narrated—or one should say, woven and reimagined—with characteristic artistry, and sometimes hyperbole, by Ezra Fleischer, whose own story is no less (and in some
ways even more) remarkable than those of the other scholar-heroes who have brought us into the kaleidoscopic world of the Geniza.
B
orn in 1928 in Timisoara, Transylvania (Romania’s second-largest city, near the Hungarian border), Fleischer came from a devout, cosmopolitan family steeped in Hebrew learning. His great-grandfather was a charismatic and prominent rabbi, and his Hebrew-teacher father founded a religious school that he directed from 1918 to 1948, when it was shut down by the authorities after the Communist takeover of the country. Yehuda Loeb Fleischer was also a serious scholar whose work was devoted above all to the important biblical commentator and fifth major poet of the Spanish-Hebrew period—the marvelously realistic and liturgically fecund Avraham ibn Ezra, after whom Avraham Ezra Fleischer was named.
The young Ezra, as he came to be called, received a superb if entirely informal Jewish education in a home that was, as he conjures it, “filled with Hebrew books, and suffused with scholarship and the love of medieval Hebrew literature.” At the municipal secondary school he worked his way through a classical secular curriculum—including several European languages and Latin poetry. Meanwhile, the family (along with its library, the largest Hebrew collection in Transylvania) survived the war years, though they lived in constant fear of deportation or even extermination. An aspiring poet, Fleischer ended up studying law, since that was the only field for which entrance exams weren’t held on the Jewish Sabbath; he took his degree but never practiced—as he was arrested in 1952 for “Zionist propaganda,” coded reference to the fact that he was actively involved with a religious youth group that encouraged immigration to Israel. Held in isolation without trial for some thirty months, during which time he was repeatedly and brutally interrogated, he was eventually given the “light” sentence of six years, though he was released in 1955, after the thaw that followed Stalin’s death. All told, he’d
spent nearly four years behind bars, much of it in solitary confinement, where he fell ill and nearly died.
Nonetheless, Fleischer describes that period of internment not as traumatic, but as something that he would come to “wear like a crown.” Imprisonment, he said, taught him an entirely new “rhythm of thought, maybe also of feeling,” and out of that recalibrated cadence of being, while still incarcerated, he composed “hundreds of poems in Hebrew,” though he wasn’t allowed to write them down. Possessed of a phenomenal memory, however, he managed to put the poems to paper soon after his release. Three years later he wrote “The Burden of Gog,” a long, vatic, defiantly ironic, and pathos-driven cry that confronted in camouflaged if dated fashion the cruelty and essential deadness at the heart of Communist rule. That poem was smuggled at great risk out of the country through diplomatic channels in Bucharest and on to Israel, where it was published in a prominent literary magazine, under a pen name supplied by the editor. By all accounts it “caused a sensation,” and for this work, the thirty-one-year-old Romanian was awarded, in absentia and pseudonymously, the still-new state’s highest honor, the Israel Prize. It is also a kind of “match” that, while listening one night to the radio, which Fleischer tuned regularly to the short-wave station “Kol Tzion laGola” (the Voice of Zion to the Exile, or Diaspora), he first heard that “The Burden of Gog,” by someone named Y. Goleh—Goleh means “a person in exile” in Hebrew and the pseudonym had been invented without his knowledge, to protect him—would be awarded the prize the following evening, on Israel’s Independence Day. The announcement, he said, left him trembling—not with joy, or pride, but in mortal fear—for discovery of the poem’s author at the time would have been tantamount to a death sentence.
Less than two years later the former prisoner–poet and his wife were in Zion, where the author of “The Burden of Gog” was, at last, given his prize personally by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Fleischer settled
in Jerusalem and took up the study of medieval Hebrew poetry under Hayyim Schirmann.
In a certain sense the two men could not have been more different: Schirmann was a consummate European secular Jew, the product of the finest prerevolutionary Russian and Weimar training; Fleischer emerged from the heart of traditional Judaism and the prisons of the Soviet bloc and remained religiously observant all his life. The former was as famous for his cautious and meticulously mapped studies as for his seamless, spellbinding written narratives that presented psychologically pitch-perfect takes on the literature and its poets; the latter tended toward dramatic conceptual and aesthetic formulations, precisely calibrated close readings, and pioneering, if sometimes ferociously elaborated, structural analyses. The bulkier mentor was almost banker-like in his shapeless suits and black ties, and, as many have noted, something of an awkward, distant cipher; the disciple with the chiseled chin was dapper, courtly, and very much present as a legendary and inspiring teacher, and as an ethical if sometimes severe upholder of professional standards. Though he lived through critical periods of his people’s history, and contributed to them in a vital fashion, Schirmann avoided political and social commentary in his work and in public; Fleischer, on the other hand, for all the nationalism evident in his scholarship—a defiant pride in the worth of Hebrew culture through the ages and a deep-seated suspicion of what he called the “mirage” of the cultural symbiosis that produced the Hebrew poetry of Spain—spoke out on the most sensitive of subjects, on several occasions offering up a devastating critique of religious and political complacency in Israeli society and, after the 1994 Ramadan and Purim massacre of Muslim worshippers by an extremist right-wing religious Jewish doctor in Hebron, delivering an astounding denunciation in a prophetic vein of this “spiller of blood” and his pious backers, “rabbis of wickedness … and sages of darkness,” whose actions “refute our entire history … and pervert [Judaism’s] sacred teachings.”
And yet, for all their differences, Fleischer’s achievement both complements and extends that of his teacher. First and foremost, the writing of both was grounded in utter and almost mind-boggling immersion in a field that evolved radically as they wrote—which is another way of saying that the Geniza figured profoundly in their work. Second, while Schirmann concentrated on the secular poetry of Spain and viewed it, in a sense, against the backdrop of later developments in European literature, Fleischer focused, for the most part, on liturgical poetry and looked to the East (Palestine and Iraq) for keys to the Spanish accomplishment. (That said, he also made major discoveries of critical early secular and sacred Andalusian poetry, rescuing from oblivion—in addition to Dunash’s wife—the still too little known work of Yosef ibn Avitor and several key poems by Menahem ben Saruk, the poet Dunash displaced at Hasdai’s court.) With this bi- or even trifocal concentration on the intricate connections between the liturgy of late antiquity, the
piyyut
of the early Middle Ages, and the Hebrew poetry of Spain, Fleischer in particular lived the Geniza as few people have and with it helped change the face of Jewish literature. Its revelations seep through all he wrote, and his accounts of what has been found there are among the most inspired since Schechter’s.
