Sacred Trash (44 page)

For the drama surrounding the publication of
Pulcellina
(Tel Aviv, 1927), see B. Z. Kedar, “S. D. Goitein and Pulcellina on the Banks of the Loire” [Heb],
Haaretz,
April 14, 1995; Shalom Spiegel, “A Play about the Martyrs of Blois” [Heb],
Davar,
Oct. 7, 14, 21, 1927.

Information about Theresa Goitein comes from Ayala Gordon,
Theresa Gottlieb Goitein
[Heb] (Jerusalem, 2008); Ayala Gordon, “Shelomo Dov Goitein and His Wife Theresa (Gottlieb)” [Heb], in
History of the Goitein Family
[Heb], and interviews with Ayala and Amirav Gordon and Elon and Harriet Goitein.

The descriptions of Goitein are as follows: “like a bumblebee,” Joshua Blau, conversation with the authors, Oct. 5, 2009; “trains constantly coming and going,” SDG diary, Jan. 5, 1955. His letter “I fear that our entire existence” was written to Ernest Simon, Dec. 18, 1947 (NLI Arc 4 1751/426).

The account of Goitein’s “special mission” is compiled from “The Life Story of a Scholar”; Mordechai Friedman, preface, Goitein and Friedman,
India Traders of the Middle Ages: Documents from the Cairo Geniza (“India Book”)
(Leiden, 2008); Friedman, “A Note” [Heb]; Gordon,
History of the Goitein Family
[Heb]; interviews with Ayala Gordon, Elon Goitein, and Mark Cohen; Friedman, e-mail to the authors, Sept. 15, 2009; Norman Stillman, e-mail to the authors, Oct. 1, 2009.

Goitein reported on his trip to Paris in “The Congress of Orientalists” [Heb],
Haaretz,
Sept. 17, 1948, and wrote of being in Budapest (without specifying why he was there) in “A Visit to Hungary” [Heb],
Haaretz,
Nov. 19, 1948, and again in “On the Jews of Hungary” [Heb],
Haaretz,
Jan. 7, 1949. His description of the plane filled with chickens is from his diary, Sept. 26, 1948, when he was making plans to fly home. He returned to Jerusalem on Oct. 12. (Our thanks to Ayala Goitein Gordon for help with the timeline of his trip.)

For more on the atrocities that Theresa witnessed, see, for instance, Goitein’s letter to Ernest Simon, April 19, 1948, in which he describes her disgust at having to provide medical care to the perpetrators of the Deir Yassin massacre (NLI Arc 4 1751/426), and her own letter to Goitein (then in Paris) in
Between Jerusalem and Neve-Yam
[Heb] from Aug. 8, 1948, about their neighbor who died from a bullet to the stomach.

Accounts of the fate of the David Kaufmann collection are contradictory. In “The Life Story of a Scholar,” Goitein says that it was thought at the time of his trip that the collection had been destroyed during the war, but in July of 1948, at the International Congress of Orientalists, Samuel Löwinger and Alexander Scheiber presented their
Genizah Publications in Memory of Prof. Dr. David Kaufmann
(Budapest, 1949) and announced that the collection had mostly survived. Goitein was present at the congress and would have known this. It is true that several years earlier it was believed that the whole collection was lost. See Dov Schidorsky,
Burning Scrolls and Flying Letters: A History of Book Collections and Libraries in Mandatory Palestine and of Book Salvaging Efforts in Europe after the Holocaust
[Heb] (Jerusalem, 2008).

Information about Goldziher comes from Raphael Patai,
Ignaz Goldziher and His Oriental Diary
(Detroit, 1987); Goitein, “Goldziher as Seen through His Letters” [Heb],
Ignace Goldziher Memorial Volume,
part I, Samuel Löwinger and Joseph Somogyi, eds. (Budapest, 1948); Goitein, review of Alexander Scheiber, ed.,
Ignaz Goldziher Tagebuch,
in
JSS
41, 1979; Goitein, “Goldziher, the Father of Islamic Studies” [Arabic],
al-Katib al-Masri
5, 1947; Goitein, “I. Goldziher’s Hebrew Writings” [Heb],
Kiryat Sefer
23, 1946–47. Goldziher’s description of the Kaufmann fragments is recounted in A. Scheiber, “The Kaufmann-Genizah: Its Importance for the World of Scholarship,” in
Jubilee Volume of the Oriental Collection.
Goitein’s comments about Goldziher’s work as a mosaic come from “Goldziher as Seen through His Letters” [Heb]. For more on the connection between Goldziher and Goitein, see Gideon Libson, “Hidden Worlds and Open Shutters.”

For more about Scheiber, see
Occident and Orient: A Tribute to the Memory of Alexander Scheiber
(Budapest, 1988); Menahem Schmelzer, “Scheiber’s Beloved Books,” in
Studies in Jewish Bibliography.
Details about the Hungarian fragments appear in S. D. Goitein, “Early Letters and Documents from the Collection of the Late David Kaufmann” [Heb],
Tarbiz
20, 1950. Goitein’s diary entries are as follows: “What should I do now?” Goitein diary, Nov. 15, 1952; “Just now I feel,” Sept. 16, 1954.

Goitein’s description of “the heartbreak, horror and wrath” comes from Goitein, “The Life Story of a Scholar.” The term “pain and piety” is Leopold Zunz’s. See Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi in
Shelomo Dov Goitein;
Ismar Schorsch, “The Lachrymose Conception of Jewish History,” in his
Text and Context: The Turn to History in Modern Judaism
(Waltham, 1994). Baron’s famous comments about the lachrymose conception are drawn from “Ghetto and Emancipation,” reprinted in
The Menorah Treasury,
Leo W. Schwarz, ed. (Philadelphia, 1964). For more on the connection between Goitein and Baron, see Mark Cohen,
Under Crescent & Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages
(Princeton, 1994); Goitein, “Jewish History—the First 2,000 Years,”
Jewish Observer and Middle East Review,
Aug. 14, 1953; Goitein review of
A Social and Religious History of the Jews
in
Speculum
36/3, July 1961. See also Mark Cohen, “The Neo-Lachrymose Conception of Jewish History” and Norman Stillman, “Myth, Countermyth and Distortion,” both in
Tikkun
6/3, 1991.

Goitein’s study of the India trade is described in his “Involvement in Geniza Research”; “The Jewish India-Merchants of the Middle Ages,”
India and Israel
5/12, 1953; “From the Mediterranean to India: Documents on the Trade to India, South Arabia, and East Africa from the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,”
Speculum
24/2, part 1, April 1954. For the history of the “India Book,” see also Friedman, preface,
India Traders;
Goitein,
Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders
(Princeton, 1973). Goitein repeats the story about the offer to write a more general book almost verbatim in the preface to
MS
1 and “Involvement in Geniza Research.”

Details of the “The Cairo Geniza Documents Project” appear in SDG Geniza Lab 2J.1.2, a report on his work during the summer of 1958. This seems to be an account that Goitein prepared for Fernand Braudel’s Ecole pratique des hautes études (VIº section) in Paris, which was partially funding his research. His initial description of an “eight-volume collection” comes from the June 15, 1955, letter to Clemens Heller that he mentions on the first page of
MS
1. Our thanks to Peter Miller for generously showing us this letter (from the files of l’Ecole des hautes études), and for sharing with us his research about the failed Goitein-Braudel connection. The quotes that involve the “workers” and “a whole generation of scholars” also come from the Heller-Goitein correspondence housed there. For the contents of the lab, see Goitein, “Involvement in Geniza Research.” Goitein’s diary entries are as follows: “I’ve completely stopped,” Dec. 2, 1957; “the rest,” undated.

For all of the references to the material covered in
A Mediterranean Society,
see the five volumes of text and, especially, volume six, the cumulative index, edited by Goitein and Paula Sanders. All Goitein quotes in what follows come from
MS
unless otherwise noted. Readers should note that the single-volume abridgement of
A Mediterranean Society
(made by another scholar, after Goitein’s death) lacks most of the daily, economic, linguistic, and human detail that distinguishes the original; it is therefore in no way representative of Goitein’s work.

The description of the “gorgeous variety of colorful robes” comes from “The Mediterranean Jewish World in the Light of the Cairo Geniza,” SDG Geniza Lab 2J.2.1. The term “religious democracy” figures prominently in
MS
2 (see preface). Goitein’s use of the term is described in Goitein, “Political Conflict and the Use of Power,” in
Kinship & Consent: The Jewish Political Tradition and Its Contemporary Uses,
Daniel I. Elazar, ed. (New Brunswick, 1997). For more on the
dhimmi,
see Mark Cohen,
Under Crescent & Cross;
Cohen, “The Neo-Lachrymose Conception of Jewish History.”

Information about Wuhsha comes from Goitein,
MS
3: viii, D; Goitein, “A Jewish Business Woman of the Eleventh Century,”
JQR
57, seventy-fifth anniversary issue, 1967; Friedman-Goitein,
India Traders,
section 2, chapter 1. For more on the economic life of women in Geniza society, see Goitein
MS
1: ii, 6;
MS
3: viii, D; Mark Cohen,
Poverty and Charity;
Cohen,
The Voice of the Poor in the Middle Ages: An Anthology of Documents from the Cairo Geniza (
Princeton, 1985). For more on the sexual context in which Wuhsha lived, see Goitein, “The Sexual Mores of the Common People,” in
Society and the Sexes in Medieval Islam,
Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid Marsot, ed. (Malibu, 1979).

Accounts of Abraham Maimonides’ life and work come from Goitein,
MS
5: x, D; Goitein, “Abraham Maimonides and His Pietist Circle,” in
Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies,
Alexander Altmann, ed. (Cambridge, 1967); Goitein, “A Treatise in Defense of the Pietists by Abraham Maimonides,”
JJS
16, 1965; Goitein, “The Renewal of the Controversy Surrounding the Prayer for the Head of the Community at Abraham Maimuni’s Time” [Heb],
Ignace Goldhizer Memorial Volume,
part 2 (Jerusalem, 1958); A. H. Freimann and S. D. Goitein,
Abraham Maimuni: Responsa
[Heb] (Jerusalem, 1938); Goitein, “Documents on Abraham Maimonides and His Pietist Circle” [Heb],
Tarbiz
33, 1964; Samuel Rosenblatt,
The High Ways to Perfection of Abraham Maimonides
(New York, 1927/Baltimore, 1938); Goitein, review of
The High Ways to Perfection,
in
Kiryat Sefer
15, 1938–39; Mordechai A. Friedman, “Responsa of R. Abraham Maimonides from the Cairo Geniza: A Preliminary Review,”
Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research
56, 1990; Friedman, “Responsa of Abraham Maimonides on a Debtor’s Travails,” in
Genizah Research after Ninety Years: The Case of Judaeo-Arabic,
Joshua Blau and Stefan C. Reif, eds. (Cambridge, 1992); Paul B. Fenton, “Abraham Maimonides (1168–1237): Founding a Mystical Dynasty,” in
Jewish Mystical Leaders and Leadership in the
13
th Century,
Moshe Idel and Mortimer Ostrow, eds. (Northvale, 1998); Gerson Cohen, “The Soteriology of R. Abraham Maimuni,”
Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research
35/36, 1967–68; Y. Tzvi Langermann, “From Private Devotion to Communal Prayer: New Light on Abraham Maimonides’ Synagogue Reforms,”
Ginzei Qedem
1, 2005. All of Goitein’s quotes about Abraham come from
MS
5: x, D. Quotes from Abraham are from Rosenblatt,
High Ways
(1938), translation adjusted slightly by the authors. For more on the comparison between Goitein and Abraham Maimonides, see Udovitch, “Foreword”; Libson, “Hidden Worlds”; Wasserstrom, “Apology.”

The notion of
MS
as “only a sketch” is described in Mark Cohen, “Shelemo Dov Goitein.” Abraham Udovitch is the colleague who saw the fifth volume as “the most difficult to conceptualize” (see “Foreword,”
MS
5). Goitein’s account of the number of letters he wrote every day is drawn from Friedman: “Prof. S. D. Goitein, Man and Scholar” [Heb].

“Goitein’s protégés and students” include those scholars who completed their doctoral work with him. Among these were Mordechai Friedman, Norman Stillman, Yedida Stillman, Moshe Gil, and Gershon Weiss. Later, after his retirement, Goitein was an important mentor to others, including Mark Cohen. See Cohen, “Shelomo Dov Goitein.”

For more on “EurAfrAsia,” see Goitein, “M.E.’s Future in Eurafrasia,”
Jerusalem Post,
Feb. 15, 1957; Goitein, “EurAfrAsia,”
New Outlook
1/11, 1958. Goitein’s letter about Ihud was written to Ernest Simon, March 25, 1948 (NLI Arc 4 1751/426). His letter to Baneth is dated Nov. 11, 1967.

Goitein wrote often on symbiosis. The quote cited here is drawn from Goitein, “On Jewish-Arab Symbiosis” [Heb],
Molad
2/11, 1949. For more on the historical context in which
Jews and Arabs
was written, see Mark Cohen, “Introduction to the Dover Edition,” in
Jews and Arabs: A Concise History of Their Cultural Relations
(Mineola, 2004). The quote from Agnon is from a 1961 letter (no month or day) in Gordon,
Between Shelemo Dov Goitein and Shmuel Yosef Agnon
[Heb].

Although Goitein worked for many years in the United States without honors or much public attention, at the very end of his life he was awarded one of the first MacArthur fellowships. He was the oldest fellow that year. See Kathleen Teltsch, “20 Get Cash Prizes in ‘Genius’ Search,”
New York Times,
Jan. 19, 1983. The description of Goitein as “a born schoolmaster” is from Scholem,
From Berlin.
All quotes from Eric Ormsby are from “Born Schulmeister.”

That Goitein returned immediately to work on the “India Book” is indicated in a letter to Stefan Reif, Dec. 21, 1984 (files of T-S Genizah Research Unit) and another to Mordechai Friedman, Jan. 5, 1985 (Friedman, preface,
India Traders
). After Goitein’s death, Friedman completed the work on the “India Book.” It was published in 2008 as
India Traders of the Middle Ages.