Sacred Trash (46 page)

Authors: Adina Hoffman

BOOK: Sacred Trash

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is a book about a lost culture and the scholar-heroes who have been retrieving it bit by dusty bit for well over a century. To do justice to the ongoing aspect of that project would have required adding numerous chapters to the volume, detailing the contribution of the scores of men and women hard at work with the Geniza material today. Without their seemingly tireless efforts this book would not have been conceivable; nor would its composition have been as pleasurable as it was without the magnanimity of so many of them. We’ve been fortunate beyond measure to have had the guidance—on the page and in person—of scholars who have lived with the Geniza day and (often well into the) night for many years now.

First and foremost, our gratitude to members—past and present—of the Cambridge University Library Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit can’t properly be put into words. With patience, warmth, precision, and humor, they brought us into their fold and gave us a world. No gift could be greater. Above all, we’re grateful to Rebecca Jefferson for her sustained and vital assistance, advice, and encouragement, and for generously sharing the fruits of her research into the early history of the Geniza’s recovery; and to Ben Outhwaite, director of the Unit—who first opened the Unit’s doors and drawers to us and personally helped us rummage through its various treasures over a period of several years. Both have become partners of a kind in the making of this book. We’re also deeply indebted to the Unit’s founder and former director, Stefan Reif, for his endless openness and willingness to share his stores of knowledge and experience with us. The late Shulie Reif was a gracious and welcoming presence as well, and we remember her for her valuable work with the Unit and for her kindness. Mark Cohen of Princeton University, and the Princeton Geniza Project, has been a close consultant on this project from the very start, and he has been generous in the extreme with his learning and his wisdom, helping us get our bearings, answering questions huge and minuscule, feeding us valuable material, and putting us in touch with critical contacts. Our debt to him is major. Early readers of parts of this book provided invaluable feedback. We’re especially glad to have been advised, prodded, boosted, and improved by the likes of (alphabetically) Yehoshua Granat, Matti Huss, James Kugel, Gabriel Levin, Laura Lieber, Stephen O’Shea, Marina Rustow, Steven Wasserstrom, Larry Yarborough, and again, Mark Cohen, Rebecca Jefferson, and Ben Outhwaite. While they can and should take credit for much that is here, all blunders and howlers are, it goes without saying, ours.

The families, friends, and former students of our book’s protagonists have also been exceptionally gracious and patient with our repeated inquiries. We hesitate to think what this book might have been without the cooperation and trust of Ayala Goitein Gordon and Amirav Gordon, Elon and Harriet Goitein, Ofra Rosner, Ada Yardeni, Shelomo and Dafna Leshem, Shelomo Aharon Wertheimer, and Shula Bergstein; Shulamit Elizur, Binyamin Elizur, Mordechai Friedman, Norman Stillman, Eric Ormsby, Joshua Blau, Paula Sanders, Dvora Bregman, and Dan Almagor. Malachi Beit-Arié, Janet Soskice, Peter N. Miller, Itta Shedletzky, Mikhail Kizilov, David Rosenthal, Yaacov Choueka, Reuven Rubelow, Shuly Rubin Schwartz, and Samir Raafat were unstintingly helpful as well. Special thanks to Yosef Yahalom for his willingness to entertain every sort of question, and, above all, for his extensive work with the Geniza documents themselves.

Heartfelt thanks are likewise due to the librarians and archivists at the Israel National Library (Avraham David, Benjamin Richler, Ezra Chwat, and the staff in the General Reading Room, the Judaica Reading Room, and the Manuscript Reading Room); the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York (Ellen Kastel, Menahem Schmelzer, Jerry Schwarzbard, David Kraemer, and David Sclar); the Schocken Institute, Jerusalem (Shmuel Glick, Baruch Yunin, Racheli Edelman); Cambridge University Library (Ngaio Vince-Dewerse); the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Piet van Boxel, Linda Needham); Westminster College, Cambridge (Margaret Thompson); St. John’s College, Cambridge (Jonathan Harrison); the Bibliothèque de Genève (Barbara Roth-Lochner); the Israel Museum (Amalyah Keshet, Rachel Laufer); the Hebrew University (Annette Freeman); and the Ezra Fleischer Geniza Research Institute for Hebrew Poetry (Sarah Cohen). We left Cairo in grateful debt to Raymond Stock, Carmen Weinstein, Mohamed el-Hawary, Nevette Bowen, Peter Kenyon, and Barbara Surk.

Various other friends and colleagues have provided critical doses of advice, company, and/or assistance of one sort or another along the way to this book, and we’re in their debt as well: Jenny Diski, Ian Patterson, María Rosa Menocal, Miriam Altshuler, Ivan Marcus, Jacob Abolafia, Giddon Ticotsky, Dan Laor, Gidi Nevo, David Stern, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Gali Gamliel-Fleischer, Francesco Spagnolo, Emily Levine, Michael Chazan, Yael Cohen, Brian Kitely, Sarah Pessin, and Amiel Vardi.

We’re also grateful to the many people who worked on this volume at Schocken Books and Random House. We’re especially lucky to have been in the good hands of Altie Karper and Dan Frank, and we thank them for their enthusiastic support.

And last, though he was also first, it’s a special pleasure to thank Jonathan Rosen—who believed in this project from the speculative start and saw it through to this inky end.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

A
DINA
H
OFFMAN
is the author of
House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood
and
My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century,
which was named one of the best twenty books of 2009 by the
Barnes & Noble Review
and one of the top ten biographies of the year by
Booklist. My Happiness
also received Britain’s 2010
Jewish Quarterly–
Wingate Prize. Hoffman’s essays and criticism have appeared in
The Nation,
the
Washington Post,
the
TLS, Raritan,
the
Boston Globe, New York Newsday, Tin House,
and on the World Service of the BBC. Formerly a film critic for the
American Prospect
and the
Jerusalem Post,
she is—with Peter Cole—one of the founders and editors of Ibis Editions.

P
ETER
C
OLE
’s most recent book of poetry is
Things on Which I’ve Stumbled—
whose title poem revolves around the Cairo Geniza. Cole’s translations from Hebrew and Arabic include
War & Love, Love & War: New and Selected Poems
by Aharon Shabtai;
So What: New & Selected Poems
by Taha Muhammad Ali; and
The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950–1492
, which received the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry and the American Association of Publishers’ 2008 Hawkins Award for the outstanding university press book of the year. Cole has received numerous other honors for his work, including an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the PEN Translation Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from the NEA, the NEH, and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2007 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Hoffman and Cole live, together, in Jerusalem and New Haven.

JEWISH ENCOUNTERS

Jonathan Rosen, General Editor