Hebrew Voices #191 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 3

Dr. Nehemia Gordon - Bible Scholar at NehemiasWall.com

In this episode of Hebrew Voices #191 - The Cairo Genizah: Part 3, Nehemia continues to discuss with the head of the Cambridge Genizah Research Unit how fragments from 1,000 years ago now scattered in libraries throughout the globe are reunited using technology and scholarly elbow grease. They also talk about the coming AI revolution that will change the face of Hebrew scholarship.

I look forward to reading your comments!

PODCAST VERSION:

Download Audio

Transcript

Hebrew Voices #191 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 3

You are listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon's Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

Ben: And he really got seduced by the intimacy that comes from reading documents that were not intended for posterity. The letters were only ever intended to be read by one or two people, perhaps to be read out in the synagogue.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: But not more than that. And yet here you are a thousand years later, and you’re reading about, “Why won’t you come home? Your daughter is pregnant. And everyone’s saying, ‘Where’s her father?’”

Nehemia: Wow. That’s pretty cool.

Nehemia: Shalom, this is Nehemia Gordon, welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today with Dr. Ben Outhwaite, who is the head of the Genizah Research Unit at the University of Cambridge. He got his PhD here at the University of Cambridge. Thank you for joining the program.

Ben: Thanks very much for having me.

Nehemia: Alright, so, Solomon Schechter brings these boxes and shiploads of stuff back here to Cambridge, and he then has to catalog it.

Ben: Yes. So, that’s in 1898 that he settled down to start working on it, and that’s when the photos were taken. He starts, really, just randomly pulling stuff out. He’s not really cataloging, he’s looking for stuff, and he’s publishing it in the JQR (Jewish Quarterly Review).

Nehemia: Okay. Can we say something about the JQR? This blows my mind, that we have a journal that’s around today that goes back to the 19th century. That’s incredible!

Ben: It was the leading… the Jewish Quarterly Review was the leading English language… I don’t know, was it a product of the Wissenschaft des Judentums Movement?

Nehemia: I mean, wasn’t it in the United States? Am I wrong about that, that the JQR started in the U.S.?

Ben: I don’t know.

Nehemia: So, in Hebrew literature of the early 20th century they referred to the “English journal” and the “French journal”, by which they mean the Jewish Quarterly Review and the Revue des Études Juives, which both go back to the 19th century, and both are around today.

Ben: Well, the JQR is fantastic. I’m not sure that the JQR has quite the same excitement they had in the early days, because there are so many journals…

Nehemia: Right.

Ben: But in the early days, every issue would have had an article by Schechter. Every issue would then have an article with rebuttal by Margoliouth or something like that. But there would also be Neubauer…

Nehemia: Even Neubauer, which is the rivalry between Cambridge and Oxford.

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: I never realized that! Oh!

Ben: Yeah. And then later on, what’s his name… Solomon Zeitlin. He was very skeptical about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Nehemia: So, tell us about that. That’s an amazing story!

Ben: Well, I don’t know that much about it. I know because he launched attacks on the Dead Sea Scrolls and often referred to the sort of scurrilous and spurious nature of the Ben Sira discoveries, and so on. He regarded the Dead Sea discoveries that Schechter made as being part and parcel of the same…

Nehemia: So, he thought that the Dead Sea Scrolls were from the Middle Ages.

Ben: Middle Ages, yeah.

Nehemia: Just like the Cairo Genizah.

Ben: Yeah. And I think that to his dying day he was holding onto that.

Nehemia: But I think he had people who agreed with him until they did the Carbon-14 tests.

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: And then they’re like, “Okay, obviously they’re not from the Middle Ages.”

Ben: Yeah. But he wrote article after article accusing the whole world of having fallen for this fraud.

Nehemia: That’s amazing!

Ben: And Margoliouth did exactly the same, because Margoliouth, in the generation before him, was saying, “Don’t believe this rubbish about Ben Sira. It’s clearly a medieval thing.”

Nehemia: Like a back translation from Greek?

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: Wow, okay. So, he’s not really cataloging it, because today we use TS – Taylor-Schechter. So, what was Taylor’s involvement? Was it just funding?

Ben: So, Schechter gave the collection… Schechter wasn’t here that long. Schechter in 1904 was asked to go to the Jewish Theological Seminary and re-found it…

Nehemia: In New York.

Ben: …and help save conservative Judaism in New York.

Nehemia: Okay. And that’s why the Conservative Jewish day schools in the U.S. are called Solomon Schechter Day School.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay! That makes a lot of sense.

Ben: And so, he’d been imported to England to help here, and then he was now needed elsewhere.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: So, he goes off in 1904 or 1905, I think, he goes off to the US, but because he acquired the collection for Cambridge, on Cambridge time, he gives it to the library, and he gives some conditions. It has to be named after the two people who made it possible, which is Taylor and Schechter. Taylor gave the money; Schechter did the work.

Nehemia: Okay, so Taylor didn’t actually do the cataloging.

Ben: I think he was involved in the Greek stuff, yes, because he published some of the Greek stuff.

Nehemia: Alright.

Ben: And it has to be conserved and cataloged by the library.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And could they send him progress reports, that kind of thing. And so, he goes off and the library appoints Ernest Worman to catalog it, who is a young library assistant who is self-taught in Hebrew and Arabic.

Nehemia: Wow!

Ben: He was self-taught in many languages, because before working on the Genizah he’s copying Indian manuscripts for people. Because in those days you had two ways of getting access to a manuscript, really. One was to write to them and ask them to send you the manuscript, which they did occasionally. So, in the early days, we sent Genizah manuscripts to Kahle.

Nehemia: In Germany?

Ben: In Germany, yeah.

Nehemia: You actually sent the physical manuscript to him! Can we go back to that please?

Ben: The recent discovery by Judith, that we have one of the earliest copies of the Mishnah manuscripts, which can now be reliably dated to 841 CE. There are many bits of that scattered in our collection, and they were first identified by Kahle in an article he wrote about the Mishnah in Babylonia. Because they’ve got Babylonian vocalization, supralinear vocalization. And he identified a whole bunch of these from one manuscript. He called them Manuscript A, Manuscript B, and so on.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And he says this cannot be any later than the 9th century or something, the late 9th century. I can’t remember what he says. But anyway, he was spot on, because Judith found the colophon in another collection.

Nehemia: Judith Schlanger found it in… was it Toronto, I think?

Ben: In Toronto, yeah. It was one of the Friedberg manuscripts.

Nehemia: And it’s the oldest… correct me if I’m wrong, it’s the oldest dated Hebrew manuscript that has an actual date.

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: 841 CE.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. And there might be earlier manuscripts, but they don’t have the date recorded in them.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: That we know of so far.

Ben: And prior to that the oldest was 903-904. So, this pushes it back by 60 years.

Nehemia: That’s the Joseph Ben Nimrud manuscript…

Ben: Yes, from Babylon, from Iran, sorry, from Gonbad-e Malgan.

Nehemia: And there are other ones that are before the 903-904 manuscript, but they’re considered dubious, which we’ll get to if we have time.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: All the dubious manuscripts, or the possibly fake colophons.

Ben: So Kahle cataloged and wrote a study on those manuscripts, and he does write in his article that he’d asked for them to be sent to him so that he could do a study.

Nehemia: That’s amazing.

Ben: That’s not that uncommon, actually. That happened quite a lot. But the other way of doing it is you ask some munchkin in the library to copy it for you, and that’s what Ernest Worman’s job was. So, he had to learn various Indian languages to copy manuscripts.

Nehemia: Oh, wow! Because people were saying, “Hey, I want to copy this Sanskrit manuscript,” or something…

Ben: Yeah, “Can you please copy it for me?” Because there wasn’t photocopying.

Nehemia: This was one of the problems with Firkovich, which hopefully we’ll get to, which is that early on he would send transcripts of these manuscripts from his collection, and then people started to say, “Wait a minute, maybe you just made that up. How do we know that manuscript even exists?”

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: But you’re saying it was common practice that a transcript would be sent.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay, so, this librarian here at Cambridge…

Ben: Ernest Worman. He was put in charge of cataloging the collection, and we’ve got his old notebooks.

Nehemia: Oh wow!

Ben: So, he has these lovely old, marbled notebooks in sort of Victorian copper plate. He’s going through each one identifying it, and it’s being conserved and put under glass and what they did in the early days… And he’s amazing, because he has to teach himself Judeo-Arabic. He’s learned Arabic, he knows Hebrew, which, I don’t know when he learned Hebrew, but his Hebrew seems to be pretty good. But he has to teach himself Judeo-Arabic. So, in the front of the notebook you can see he’s writing out the paradigms of Arabic verbs in Hebrew script so he can learn them.

Nehemia: Oh, that’s pretty cool.

Ben: And he’s going through and identifying really quite tricky stuff, because no one… Steinschneider studied Judeo-Arabic, but not a lot of Jewish scholars knew Arabic as a Jewish language. Schechter certainly didn’t. Jacob Mann, a great early historian of the Genizah, wrote on Jews from Fatimid Egypt. He did that without knowing any Arabic.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: But anyway, he’s going through cataloging them one by one. And given enough time he would have done the whole collection, but he died five years later, quite young, at 38 or something.

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

Ben: And at that point, the library sort of stopped cataloging.

Nehemia: Really!

Ben: Yeah, yeah. They kept the collection; they still had someone who looked after it, but they didn’t do any more conservation or cataloging. And so, a lot of the collection, the majority of the collection, was still in the tea chests.

Nehemia: You’re kidding! So, it’s in these wooden boxes…

Ben: Yeah. And the library itself used to be in the center of town, a mile away from where we are now, in an old medieval building. But in the 1930’s they built this new building because the library had outgrown the old building. And so, they moved all of the contents over, and they moved all the boxes and put them here. And then during the Second World War, they were trying to save space and so on, so there was talk about burning the collection because…

Nehemia: Are you serious?

Ben: Yeah, because they were just sitting in boxes, and no one wanted it. But they decided against it.

Nehemia: Thank God!

Ben: Yeah. And then in the 1960’s, Israeli scholars started turning up. And one of them, one in particular was very important, S. D. Goitein. Goitein was an Arabist who worked in Yemen, a German Jew originally who studied Arabic. He ended up in Budapest looking at manuscripts from the David Kaufmann Collection there. Now, some of those are from the Genizah, because Kaufmann acquired his own Genizah collection. And while he was there the librarians told him, “If you’re interested in this kind of thing, you should go to Cambridge, because there’s loads more.” So, he came to Cambridge, and apparently, he was working in our manuscript reading room looking at items under glass that Ernest Worman 60 years before had had conserved.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: And the librarian of the library, the main man, walked past and said, “Oh, if you like those, you should look out the back. There’s loads more in boxes.” And supposedly he went out the back and pulled from one of these boxes a document that talked about the medieval Jewish trade of India, and he said, “You don’t know what a treasure you have.”

Nehemia: Wow!

Ben: And part of this was because scholarship wasn’t ready. In the early days, scholarship wasn’t ready for a heterogeneous collection like this. Schechter was interested in… well not really even the Bible; he was interested in Midrashim, and Ben Sira, and the rabbis and that kind of stuff, a bit of Saadia, but he definitely wasn’t interested in how Jews lived their lives in the Middle Ages. He wasn’t interested in how Islam ruled the Jewish community. He wasn’t interested in any of that. And yet by the time you get to the 1960’s, economic history and social history has become the vogue in historical circles, and social history, in particular, is the great strength of the Genizah. What other collection has the writings of everyday ordinary people about their everyday ordinary lives in the Middle Ages?

Nehemia: Wow, that’s a really interesting point. Historians used to focus on kings and dates of wars and battles.

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: And they still do, but then also it’s the history of housewives…

Ben: Yeah, exactly. You can see that. Schechter was interested in Saadia Gaon, he was not interested in Wuhsha, the female broker.

Nehemia: Is that an actual person?

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: What was she a broker of?

Ben: Well, she inherited a brokerage business from her father, I think. Goitein wrote a whole article about her, she was a businesswoman of the 12th century.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And she was infamous because she had a child out of wedlock.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: We know about it because there was a court case, and we have the court records in the Genizah. We also have her will. She got married to a man who was from somewhere else outside of Egypt, but they got married before a Muslim judge, possibly because he was already married to someone else.

Nehemia: Oh.

Ben: It’s not quite clear. So, they used a different venue to get married, and had a child with him. And she was worried, because he was technically married to someone else, that he would deny the child was his and that would cause the child problems. He wouldn’t be accepted as a member of the community, it would cause inheritance problems, all sorts of stuff. And so, she arranged that two witnesses, fine upstanding members of the Jewish community, would walk in on her while she was with him, and they would testify in a court about what they had seen, and therefore proving the two were in a relationship.

Nehemia: Okay. Oh wow, that’s interesting.

Ben: And we know that, because they testified in a court case which we have the transcript of, that they had been asked by Wuhsha, who had come down… in fact, in the documents, she says she comes down to this guy who’s called the Diadem, and she says to him, “Oh what a mess I’m in. I’ve become pregnant by this man. I need you to go upstairs and catch us together so he can’t refute that it’s his child.”

Nehemia: Oh, okay. And this has to do with the Jewish concept of marriage, that one of the ways of being married…

Ben: Is by intercourse.

Nehemia: Exactly. Well, not just intercourse, but intercourse with the person you live with. In other words, common law marriage is marriage in Jewish sources.

Ben: Yes.

Nehemia: Or one of the types of marriage. And so, if she could prove that they had been intimate, then they are married.

Ben: Yeah. And so, she arranges for these two… I think it’s the shopkeeper and this guy called the Diadem, I can’t quite remember, to go upstairs in their apartment and sort of walk in while they’re together, and then they testify to it.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: And so, this guarantees her child will be able to operate, not as a bastard, as a mamzer… But also, in her will, we learn… I can’t remember where we learn it, but she gets excommunicated…

Nehemia: Oh, no.

Ben: Because of her behavior, from the synagogue, which means she can’t attend services and all that kind of stuff. In her will, she leaves money to both synagogues in Fustat, so to the Iraqi synagogue and to the Palestinian synagogue. And probably, one, she’s obviously generous… Oh, to her ex-husband she leaves no money at all, she says, except she forgives him for the considerable amounts of money that he owes her.

Nehemia: Okay! Why? Because her estate could have demanded those debts to be repaid?

Ben: Yeah, I guess so.

Nehemia: Oh, wow. Okay.

Ben: If you still owe them money, you owe them money whether you’re dead or not.

Nehemia: Then the synagogue shows up and says, “Hey, you owe us the money because we inherited from Wuhsha.”

Ben: Yeah. But anyway, she left money. So, what happens, of course, is that on high holy days or whenever they read out the list of benefactors, they’re going to have to read the name of Wuhsha, the excommunicated.

Nehemia: Ah! Okay, that’s her way of kind of…

Ben: The whore of the fortress of Babylon.

Nehemia: Oh wow! That’s a great story.

Alright, so, in the 60’s people started showing up from Israel, Goitein…

Ben: And Goitein in particular. And at that point, the library appoints a new librarian specifically to look after the collection, which is Dr. Knopf, K-N-O-P-F. I think he went off to become the librarian at Bar Ilan.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And he restarts the whole process that’s been dormant for 50 years, of conserving and cataloging the collection. So, he starts the process of cataloging the Bible manuscripts, which eventually become the catalog by Malcolm Davis.

Nehemia: Not just Davis, Davis and…

Ben: Davis and Outhwaite, many, many years later.

Nehemia: So, you were part of that.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: That’s where I first heard your name. When I met you the first time, I’m like, “Wait. This guy’s from the catalog!”

Ben: That’s right, my magnum opus.

Nehemia: Is he real in the flesh? No, I really thought you were this legendary figure because of your David and Outhwaite catalog.

Ben: No, I came much later. Davis had already done all the work, and I just sort of polished it for publication.

Nehemia: Okay, well you did some of it, obviously!

Ben: Yeah. And so, Dr. Knopf started that off, and then after a while he left to go off and they decided to appoint a new person to replace him. And so, that’s when Stefan Reif arrived. Stefan Reif was appointed, and Stefan, sort of gauging the whole scale of the task, decided you couldn’t just do this the way that you would do any library collection, because library collections are full of uncataloged, unconserved collections. Because we keep things for posterity… so there’s always the idea, “Well, we’ll bring them into the library, and we’ll worry about them later.” Which is why things sit on our shelves for centuries not being read or cataloged.

Nehemia: I’ve been to library archives where they bring out a box. And what’s in that box? Nobody knows. You’ve got to go through it and see.

Ben: Because it’s easy to acquire collections, but it’s very difficult to get money for cataloging.

Nehemia: Hmm, okay, I never thought of that.

Ben: And although you’d think that cataloging was a core activity of the library, all of our efforts are for cataloging the new books that come in, and not for the ancient collections we have hanging around. Anyway, so Stefan decided what it needed was to create a research center to actually drum up interest in the collection and start fundraising for it. So, he did that. In 1974 he created the Genizah Research Unit.

Nehemia: Which is where we’re sitting right now.

Ben: Which is where we are now, and I’m now the head of.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And he did deals… well, the Chief Rabbi of England who then was… had fundraising dinners. Stefan was very good at schmoozing the wider Jewish community in England, and he was able to fund the complete conservation, and Israel as well. So, Israel got copies of the microfilm of all of our material for the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts, which is why the Genizah has been available since the 1970’s or 80’s in the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts. And so, he did all that and within about 10 years he had conserved the whole collection and begun the process of these catalog volumes that we produced.

Nehemia: And when you microfilm something, you’re basically photographing it, and then it has a shelf mark? Was that part of the idea, or did it already have a shelf mark?

Ben: No, some shelf marks were added at that stage.

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

Ben: So, Goitein himself helped with the… that’s why the collection… if you use the collection today, we talk about the old series, the new series and the additional series.

Nehemia: So, explain that. I’ve never understood that fully.

Ben: The old series comprises lots of different sections; there’s the Arabic, there’s the miscellaneous, there’s TSA, B, C, D and all that. The old series is what was originally sorted and conserved in the days of Worman, essentially.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: A bit of overlap, but that’s it. That’s the stuff that was conserved and identified early on. The new series was the stuff that was conserved after Goitein had come and said, “This stuff is important.” And he helped categorize some of that. His fingerprints are all over the collection, both literally and metaphorically, because he put great store by the documentary corpus, not just the literary, he wasn’t interested in the Bible. But he put great store by all these tattered remnants of the Jewish trade of India, and some amazing things we have from there…

Nehemia: And he really was an historian of… I mean, what I know of his work is mostly about merchant activity, right?

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: That’s what I know of it. So, he really was almost like an economic historian.

Ben: He began life as sort of a linguist folklorist, and then he was an economic historian by the time he started working on… he wrote his five volumes, A Mediterranean Society.

Nehemia: Right, that’s the one I know.

Ben: The first volume is called Economic Foundations. At that point he was still an economic historian. He was interested in… well, they didn’t have spreadsheets in those days, but he would have been interested in spreadsheets.

Nehemia: Well, they had them, but they were just physical; they weren’t in Excel!

Ben: Yeah, he probably had a slide rule. But anyway, in that book are chapters on the size and types of baskets used to ship stuff across the Mediterranean.

Nehemia: Oh, wow!

Ben: Yeah, if you want to know how big the baskets were on a boat laden with the stuff of India going to the markets of Southern Europe, then it’s in that book. And he could give you the wages of workers, and the value of the Dinar, and the price of bread, all that kind of stuff. But he got seduced by the intimacy of the Genizah, because you’re not just reading these texts. Ibn Yiju writing from India, a famous India trader, he will be telling you about the price of spices and bronze. But at the same time, you’ll also learn that he got married to a local girl in India; pretty tricky if you’re Jewish and you want to marry a Jew in India, there aren’t so many. So, in his case what did he do? He bought a slave, he freed her, therefore she became Jewish, and he married her.

Nehemia: I see.

Ben: In later life, when he decided to move back to Egypt and settle in Yemen, they said that he’d actually broken the law because he’d actually had sex with her before he had freed her.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And therefore, that invalidated the marriage. You’re not allowed to do that.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And so, he had to get a Rabbinic ruling. So, he applied to the academy that was then in… he applied to the leadership in Yemen for a ruling. And this was a leadership that he had donated extensively to, and they ruled in his favor.

Nehemia: A-ha. That’s shocking!

Ben: And supposedly misquoting the Mishnah in doing so.

Nehemia: It helps to be a donor, I suppose!

Ben: Yeah, yeah. Anyway, in the course of reading these various economic documents, he’s also learning a lot about the lives of everyday people. And so, his next volume is more about the family and social life, and they go on and on until his final volume is about… I can’t remember what it’s actually called, but anyway, he ends up with a chapter on the Mediterranean Mind. And he starts talking about these people who were products of the Mediterranean. They were neither Jew nor Muslim, they’d see themselves in such simple terms, they were inhabitants of this great land under the Mediterranean sun. And he really got seduced by the intimacy that comes from reading documents that were not intended for posterity. The letters were only ever intended to be read by one or two people, perhaps to be read out in the synagogue.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: But not more than that. And yet here you are a thousand years later and you’re reading about, “Why won’t you come home? Your daughter is pregnant. And everyone’s saying, ‘Where’s her father?’”

Nehemia: Wow. That’s pretty cool.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: A glimpse into everyday life, that’s really cool.

Ben: So, Goitein helped create the new series, and at that point there was kind of a feeling that that’s it, we’re done. There were lots of little bits left over, but they’re too little to be of any use. But by the time Stefan got here and finished up the new series, he decided we might as well do the lot. So, that’s then the additional series, and these are all the tiny bits that Goitein thought were too small to be useful. And that became the additional series, which is actually the largest part of the collection.

Nehemia: And from my perspective with what I do, some of the most important ones. Like, some of the fragments that we’re working on, that I’m here to be working on, manuscripts and fragments, a lot of them are from the AS, the Additional Series.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: And that includes fragments of a Torah scroll that was Carbon-14 tested to the 6th or 7th century.

Ben: Yeah, and similarly all the Palestinian Niqqud fragments of Bibles. Most of those are from the Additional Series.

Nehemia: They’re tiny bits.

Ben: Yeah, because they’re old and they haven’t been well treated. They were possibly in several different Genizahs or libraries before they got to Egypt.

So yeah, that’s why the collection is divided into these series. And so, Stefan created the Genizah Research Unit in 1974, and he managed to get this great achievement done of getting everything made available. Now, he retired in 2006, and that’s when I took over. And we already had at that point, because Stefan had built up a good relationship with the Friedberg family in Toronto they’d been funding Genizah research around the world, and they were funding cataloging and so on. And when I took over, we talked to them. They were very interested in digitization, which was then becoming the big thing. Very, very few collections around the world had actually done a lot of big digitization.

Nehemia: That was 2006.

Ben: 2006.

Nehemia: Wow.

Ben: So, for about two years we quibbled over how we would do it and we planned and so on, and then we got a million pounds from the Friedberg family to digitize the whole collection. They built a team in Israel who would accept all our images, and they would process them, and they would build this great website which we all use now, the Friedberg Genizah Project website.

Nehemia: At least five days a week I use it, yeah.

Ben: And they did that. They got an Israeli computer scientist called Yaacov Choueka who had built the Bar Ilan Responsa Project website.

Nehemia: Oh, which I also use about five days a week!

Ben: Exactly! So, he had done that, which is a remarkable piece of work.

Nehemia: I didn’t know those two are related.

Ben: It’s still usable today. So, he was the perfect choice to do this. And we had long conversations with him about how exactly we were going to digitize, because it’s not easy to digitize 200,000 items. Would we include scales? Would we shoot an individual photo of each item? Which is what we more or less did. Everything had to have a number, which wasn’t that easy because we had lots of items where there were multiple pieces under one number. But that’s no good, so we had to come up with all new ways of numbering. And then shoot them on a vibrant blue background, which we really didn’t want to do, because in the early days of digitization you’d shoot on a neutral background, a black, a gray or a white. But he wanted them shot on a vibrant blue background because he had worked out that, as he said, the biggest consumer of our images in the future would not be people but computers. Right? Because, as soon as everything would be imaged, you can then do super things with silicon pieces…

Nehemia: So, he anticipated AI and big data.

Ben: Exactly.

Nehemia: Wow! This was Choueka?

Ben: Yeah. He actually said that to me, that the biggest consumer of our collection would be computers.

Nehemia: Wow, that was some insight!

Ben: And he said the problem is computers are not that smart, and they can’t see a brown manuscript against a black or gray background, especially if it’s got black ink on it, they get too confused. So, he did some calculations and worked out the exact opposite. He took an average color of our brown manuscripts, and he worked out the exact opposite with this vibrant blue color; he gave us a specific Pantone number.

Nehemia: So, a specific blue.

Ben: Yeah, a specific blue…

Nehemia: That’s cool!

Ben: …which we made sheets of that sit behind every fragment, and we called this blue “Choueka Blue”.

Nehemia: Oh really? I didn’t know that.

Ben: Yeah, because it’s a unique shade of blue.

Nehemia: That’s very interesting.

Ben: And that’s why, if you look at the collection on our website, for instance, everything is on a vibrant blue background. And after we shot everything, it took three years, it took every day of my life for three years. I wasn’t doing the photography. We had a whole team downstairs. We had three or four photographers. We bought these brand-new phase one digital backs, they were like 16 megapixels or something.

Nehemia: That’s a big deal back then! The iPhone we’re recording on has 45 megapixels, but the lens isn’t as good, probably.

Ben: No these… And so, the cameras hung above, and we shot everything at a fixed height so that in the beginning of every folder we would shoot a ruler and a color chart, and we would know, therefore, if we had a fixed height, that every item thereafter the computer would be able to measure and know exactly the scale.

Nehemia: How did you do it for really big fragments? I mean, there are fragments that are this big.

Ben: We’ve got bits of Torah scrolls and stuff like that. We had to buy this bespoke German scanning back. It was a camera that hung above a massive grate, and it shot, and it scanned the whole thing in multiple images, and then it sewed them together, stitched them together.

Nehemia: Okay. So, that’s maybe on a different scale than the other ones.

Ben: Yeah. And it had its own bespoke color space as well, which gave us some trouble, but the only thing that was capable of doing it in those days. Now it would be much easier, but it was the only thing in those days. So yeah, we had to get through that, and we were kind of learning on the job, because we had these big lenses on these cameras, and these cameras hung above, and once a day you’d shoot the ruler and then you’d shoot, shoot, shoot, and we had to get through 200,000 fragments, front and back.

Nehemia: So, here’s my big question. Today they’re all sewn into Melinex, which is this type of plastic. Were they in Melinex back then?

Ben: They were in Melinex, which is a nightmare!

Nehemia: Did you have to take them out?

Ben: No.

Nehemia: Oh, you did it through the Melinex?

Ben: Because photographers, as you said before, the art of photography is not by focusing the camera, it’s lighting the object.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Ben: So, if you have lights on both sides, you can cancel out reflections. At the end of the process, we had a quality control check where we went through and said, “No, there’s a reflection. You can’t read the text on this bit,” and we had to reshoot those. Occasionally we had to take them out of the Melinex, because the Melinex is sometimes a bit rippled.

Nehemia: And sometimes it’s full of scratches.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: Every time I see those scratches… I see them in my microscope. Every time I see them, I’m like, “Wow this really is necessary, the Melinex, because if it wasn’t here those scratches would have been on the fragment.”

Ben: Yeah. Like the Maimonides fragment that everyone has looked at. The autograph of Maimonides has got so many fingerprints, and so on, and also, I’d been there when certain Israeli government ministers have kissed the manuscripts.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: So, in the course of doing that, we…

Nehemia: Specifically the Maimonides fragment…

Ben: Yeah, Maimonides, yeah.

Nehemia: Wow, okay. They kissed it, oh boy!

Ben: One problem we hit early on was that, in shooting hundreds and thousands of images a day, you do actually need to adjust the focus on the camera even though you’re shooting at a fixed height. Because gravity… if your camera is hanging and you’ve got a big lens on it, gravity will gradually unfocus the lens, right?

Nehemia: Okay, wow!

Ben: And we didn’t discover that for some weeks.

Nehemia: Oh, no! Did you have to redo a bunch?

Ben: We had to reshoot a whole bunch of stuff as it was increasingly going blurry.

Nehemia: Wow. And this took three years?

Ben: Three years, yeah.

Nehemia: That’s pretty good!

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: It actually gives me a lot of hope, because there’s a particular collection, that I’m not going to mention here, that one of my goals in life is to get that collection digitized, and somehow facilitate that. Even if it’s not me, and we’ll talk about that afterwards. But wow, that gives me hope, because I think that collection is probably more than 200,000… no, that sounds about right. But then, it’s a lot of bound codices… anyway, okay that’s doable. Give me five years…

Ben: Yeah, yeah. And obviously technology and everything has moved on in a way. Now, when we shoot codices, we now have these amazing cradles that we use vacuum pumps to hold pages open so you don’t have to put heavy weights on them and all that, and you can shoot volumes at different angles so you don’t have to put too much pressure on the spine. All that kind of stuff you can do. When we were doing it, it was pretty basic, but the power of these new digital backs is what makes it possible. Because, if we’d done it five years before, everything would have been shot at a much lower resolution and by now we would probably be thinking we need to reshoot everything. As some of the early pioneers of digitizing their collections have discovered, if you shoot everything at 300dpi or whatever they shot in those days, it’s not good enough.

Nehemia: And I probably shouldn’t name names, but there’s one particular collection here in the United Kingdom that they were some of the pioneers… and I’m specifically thinking of the Torah scrolls they did, that basically I can’t use the images, because when I zoom into the full zoom, it’s blurry. I’m looking for details like, was a letter re-inked? Was it drawn over? Was it erased? And I can’t tell.

Ben: Yeah, yeah. So, hopefully with ours, we kind of future-proof them by shooting at the highest possible resolution.

Nehemia: Yeah, those are pretty amazing, the images you have.

Ben: When you’re shooting at that scale, you have to think about things like… Choueka wanted us to put a scale on the color chart in every photo, and to use the standard color chart or whatever. They’re quite big, and so, if you think that’s increasing the file size of every single image, once you start thinking about storage…

Nehemia: Times 200,000. Wow.

Ben: …you’re looking at adding terabytes to your storage. It’s not cheap now, but in those days it was really expensive. So, we had to not do color charts in every photo; we took an index photo at the beginning of every folder.

Nehemia: So, those little scale bars that you have, is that a physical thing or is that added afterwards in post?

Ben: The scale bar that’s in it, that’s on the class mark that’s sewn into the Melinex.

Nehemia: Oh, I see.

Ben: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Okay, that makes sense, yeah.

Ben: And then once we finished it all, once we had all 200,000… we have a copy here. We’re still gradually putting it up online with catalog descriptions. But the whole thing has been available now for years on the Friedberg Genizah website and it’s also available now on Ktiv, the national library of Israel’s fancy, new digital library. And what Choueka did in the early days was, he recognized that when you have all the photographs, you can attempt to try and reunite these torn up bits of manuscript. Because in the past… I did it myself. I managed to find two halves of Moreh Nevuchim, “The Guide for the Perplexed” by Maimonides. I found two halves. A bit was in Manchester and a bit was in our collection. The same leaf that had been torn in half and was now in two separate Genizah collections.

Nehemia: Wow, that’s a puzzle!

Ben: You can only do that from your memory.

Nehemia: Right.

Ben: But Choueka had all these images, so he hired some supercomputer time in Israel, and he ran everything through supercomputers.

Nehemia: Oh, really?

Ben: I don’t quite know exactly, but I think the computer rasterizes the images and it just looks sort of white and… because computers don’t see color anyway.

Nehemia: So, trying to fit the puzzle pieces together…

Ben: Yeah. They look at the density of ink on a page, and then they compare that with every other image.

Nehemia: Wow! All 200,000…

Ben: Yeah. And if they’re close… so, on the Friedberg Genizah website, there’s a button that says, “Find joins to this fragment.”

Nehemia: Right.

Ben: And if you have a nice three-column Bible, you’ll press that, and it’ll come back with all these printed copies of the Bible that have multiple columns.

Nehemia: Right.

Ben: So, it’s not great, but…

Nehemia: But it’s a place to start.

Ben: It is a place to start, and it has found some matches.

Nehemia: That’s amazing.

Ben: The problem there is that probably the computing power wasn’t enough, and we should probably do this again in the future and it’ll be much better.

Nehemia: What I love on that website, genizah.org, Freiberg’s site, is that you can take two different pieces and you can try to move them around. It’s literally like one of those puzzle games where you can try to fit them together. And you can probably do that yourself in Photoshop, but here you don’t have to mess around with it; it’s an interface where you can do it organically there. And then you can document that, “Hey, I found these two pieces that joined, and here’s where they join together.” And I’ve seen fragments where a bunch of different scholars have come along and fit all these pieces together, and there might be five different fragments that form a single bifolio, two leaves.

Ben: Yeah, and particularly with paper, and the kind of paper that you get in the Genizah, it does tend to fragment into tiny little pieces.

Nehemia: Alright, so that’s how they were cataloged here at Cambridge. And I’ve asked this question to other librarians… there are over a dozen libraries, maybe two or three dozen. Do you know how many have collections of Genizah fragments?

Ben: Yeah, people have done lists of them. In the back of Glickman’s book there’s a list. I can’t remember, it’s probably about two dozen.

Nehemia: So, I understand how they got to the Adler Collection in New York, because we talked about that. But how did they get to all these other places? Do we even know?

Ben: In some cases, we don’t know, but in most cases we do. There were various scholars and collectors, the David Kaufmanns, the Adlers. Oxford’s got a lot of material from the Genizah before Cambridge, even.

Nehemia: Really?

Ben: They were buying some from Wertheimer, but there were also people like the Reverend Chester, who traveled in Egypt, and he gave manuscripts to us and to Oxford.

Nehemia: And we know those came from the Genizah?

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: We mainly know that because of what’s in it, that we know it fits with other Genizah fragments. There’s collections in Geneva and Paris. There’s the Mosseri Collection. The Mosseri Genizah Collection, which is currently here on loan, which was collected by a native of Egypt, Jacques Mosseri, a member of the Jewish community of Egypt. He went down to the synagogue after Schechter, some years after Schechter.

Nehemia: So, a lot of these are leftovers that Schechter missed.

Ben: Yeah. But taking a maximalist approach to what the Genizah is, Mosseri definitely collected from the graveyards and from other…

Nehemia: So, tell us about that, the cemetery.

Ben: Well, the Jewish cemetery, the Bassatine cemetery… Schechter went there, it seems, and he dug stuff up out of the graves or the monuments.

Nehemia: What do you mean, he dug stuff out of the graves?

Ben: Well, I don’t know, but he acquired stuff from the cemetery. He doesn’t really go into more detail.

Nehemia: So, we talked in the beginning, a few hours ago, about how the Genizah process is that you would eventually put it in a grave. And you’re saying that actually happened?

Ben: Well, it does appear to have happened. So, in the 1970’s, they discovered what’s now known as the new Genizah. The Egyptian government put a road through the Bassatine Cemetery, and in the course of doing that, they did some archeological work and they found documents.

Nehemia: Okay.

Ben: And those are now known as the New Genizah, and they’ve remained in Egypt. But they’re mostly Ottoman era stuff, so the suggestion is that it seems to have been a later practice to actually bury them, physically bury them. Although that is questionable. We don’t know for sure because there have been recent Genizah finds in the cemetery which could be old, but we just don’t have enough information.

Nehemia: Is that something you can talk about?

Ben: I don’t know, really. I mean, the Egyptian government has taken them into their care, and nobody knows anything about them.

Nehemia: I see, okay.

Ben: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, some of the stuff didn’t come from the Cairo Genizah synagogue, the Ben Ezra Synagogue, it came possibly from the cemetery.

Ben: Yeah, from the cemetery. And also, of course, as I said, Schechter got stuff from the whole Jewish community, so he was getting stuff that never went anywhere near a Genizah.

Nehemia: Oh, that’s interesting.

Ben: And some of it never was in Jewish hands.

Nehemia: Thanks so much for joining us. This has been an amazing conversation.

Ben: It was a pleasure. Thank you very much.

Nehemia: Thank you.

You have been listening to Hebrew Voices with Nehemia Gordon. Thank you for supporting Nehemia Gordon’s Makor Hebrew Foundation. Learn more at NehemiasWall.com.

We hope the above transcript has proven to be a helpful resource in your study. While much effort has been taken to provide you with this transcript, it should be noted that the text has not been reviewed by the speakers and its accuracy cannot be guaranteed. If you would like to support our efforts to transcribe the teachings on NehemiasWall.com, please visit our support page. All donations are tax-deductible (501c3) and help us empower people around the world with the Hebrew sources of their faith!

---

SHARE THIS TEACHING WITH YOUR FRIENDS!
[addtoany]

---

Subscribe to "Nehemia Gordon" on your favorite podcast app!
Apple Podcasts | Amazon Music | TuneIn
Pocket Casts | Podcast Addict | CastBox | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Pandora

---

SUPPORT NEHEMIA'S RESEARCH AND TEACHINGS
(Please click here to donate)
Makor Hebrew Foundationis a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Your donation is tax-deductible.

---

RELATED EPISODES
Hebrew Voices Episodes
Support Team Study – How Medieval Jewish Children Read Hebrew
Hebrew Voices #156 – Bibles Written by Medieval Jewish Kids
Hebrew Voices #141 – When were the Hebrew Vowels Written Down
Support Team Study – 3 Hebrew Vowel Systems
Support Team Study – The Vowels of the Aleppo Codex
Hebrew Voices #153 – Sighting the New Moon in the Middle Ages
Hebrew Voices #154 – Reaping the Benefits of the Medieval Aviv Calendar: Part 1
Support Team Study – Reaping the Benefits of the Medieval Aviv Calendar: Part 2
Support Team Study – The Masorah as an Error Correcting Code
Hebrew Voices #174 – How We Got Our Hebrew Bible
Support Team Study – Bible Vowels of Ancient Israel
Hebrew Voices #144 – The Scribe of the Leningrad Codex
Hebrew Voices #183 – Early Mormonism Revealed: Part 1
Support Team Study – Early Mormonism Revealed: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #164 – A Karaite Jew on Mormonism: Part 1
Support Team Study – A Karaite Jew on Mormonism: Part 2
Hebrew Voices #161 – The Moses Scroll
Support Team Study – The Shapira Scrolls
Hebrew Voices #98 – Toilets in Ancient Israel
Hebrew Voices #26 – Easter Miracle of the Holy Fire
Support Team Study – Hebrew Bible Manuscript Gold Rush
Hebrew Voices #189 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 1
Support Team Study – The Cairo Genizah: Part 2

OTHER LINKS
Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit | Cambridge University Library
Jewish Quarterly Review
Full archive of JQR: The Jewish Quarterly Review on JSTOR
The Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society (Digitized Cairo Geniza)
Bar-Ilan Responsa Project - vast Jewish sources
Ktiv | Digitized Hebrew manuscripts (nli.org.il)
A Jewish Business Woman of the Eleventh Century on JSTOR

The post Hebrew Voices #191 – The Cairo Genizah: Part 3 appeared first on Nehemia's Wall.