Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole

A friend introduced me to the reviews of Adina Hoffman in the The Nation, in which she discusses the work of Olivia Manning. Hoffman has the most exquisite sensibility toward the conflicts in the Levant that one ignores her opinion only at their own loss.

I was interested in whatever else she wrote so I came upon Sacred Trash about the 1896 discovery of the Cairo Geniza, a cache of documents stored in a small room in Cairo that are the original documents of ten centuries of societal interaction:

"one Middle Eastern, mostly middle-class Jewish community’s detritus—its letters and poems, its wills and marriage contracts, its bills of lading and writs of divorce, its prayers, prescriptions, trousseau lists, Bibles, money orders, amulets, court depositions, ship inventories, rabbinic responsa, contracts, leases, magic charms, and receipts.


…For reasons that remain obscure, in the case of the Palestinian Jews of Fustat, of Old Cairo—who worshipped in what would eventually become known as the Ben Ezra synagogue—the tradition of geniza was, it seems, extended to include the preservation of anything written in Hebrew letters, not only religious documents, and not just in the Hebrew language. Perhaps, as one scholar has proposed, 'the very employment of the Hebrew script…sanctified written material.' Another theory holds that the Jews of this community may simply have piled up papers in their homes and periodically delivered whole cartfuls to the Geniza without bothering to separate sacred from secular writing. Or maybe, as another writer has suggested—in an effort to make sense of the hodgepodge of texts that have turned up in the Fustat Geniza—the impulse to guard the written word may have gone beyond piety and evolved into a 'generalized aversion toward casually discarding texts of any kind.' Whatever the explanation, for most of the last millennium, hundreds of thousands of scraps were tossed into the Ben Ezra Geniza, which came to serve as a kind of holy junk heap."

Hoffman and Cole tell the story of how the cache of documents was found and what happened to it after that. They introduce us to the "active imaginations" of several people who could see what riches the cache held, as well as those who wanted to use the documents for their own personal aggrandizement. But mostly it is the chatty story of thrilling discoveries and talented scholars who were able to realize what they held. In 1999 the Toronto currency trader and avid bibliophile Albert Freidberg established a non profit whose aim to to inventory and digitize every Geniza scrap in existence. Eventually full-color photographs of the documents will be available on the Friedberg website.

In the final pages Hoffman and Cole write that rummaging in the Cairo Geniza is not unlike rummaging in the attic of history. They pay tribute to the scholars who take on the work of realizing the value of the documents for us today.

"…We’ve known all along that we’d find things that some would consider rubbish and others treasure. This, though, is what literature does, what writers do—and when it comes to it, what faith is. And as this book makes clear, it is also what the scholars of the Geniza have done, in a quietly heroic way, for more than a century now. If, with Cynthia Ozick, we think of history as ‘what we make from memory,’ then these scholars have quite literally be making history by re-remembering it, by putting it back together syllable by syllable under the intense pressure of powerfully informed and at times visionary imaginations."

You can buy this book here: Tweet

Responsibility and Judgment by Hannah Arendt

I am in the middle of reading Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil and thought I might like to see what Arendt wrote after her critique of Eichmann’s trial. About the same time I found myself wrestling with the ideas presented in Naomi Klein’s 2014 book subtitled Capitalism vs. The Climate, and entitled This Changes Everything. I thought, as I read about Eichmann in Jerusalem, that some of the same “lack of the ability to think” applies to the world’s populace when it comes to lifestyle and our impact on climate.

There was a great uproar when The New Yorker magazine published Arendt’s piece on Eichmann’s trial in 1963, mostly because Arendt questioned Jewish leaders for their complicity in the destruction of their own people by a lack of resistance to the German aggression against Jews. As it happens, Arendt had further thoughts after the Eichmann trial about the phrase she coined then: “the banality of evil.”

In the 2003 edition of Responsibility and Judgment is an introduction by Jerome Kohn which begins by recalling that in 1966, a few short years after her Eichmann article, Arendt addressed a large audience that had gathered to attend a colloquium in New York. Attendees were particularly concerned at this time with the U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia, and wished to hear what Arendt advised: that is, what they could do individually and collectively to change U.S. policy.

But Arendt

"did not believe that analogies derived retrospectively from what had or had not worked in the past would avert the pitfalls of the present situation. As she saw it, the spontaneity of political action is yoked to the contingency of its specific conditions, which renders such analogies unavailing…Arendt did not mean that the past as such was irrelevant…but that the past is not past…the past—past action--can be experienced in the present…It is we as a people who are responsible for them now." (Kohn, Introduction, pp. vii-ix)

It occurs to me that she might give the same response to climate activists who sought to apportion blame for the condition of the world and the direction of policy.

In one of the shorter essays in this volume, called “Collective Responsibility,” Arendt begins

"There is such a thing as responsibility for things one has not done; one can be held liable for them…Two conditions have to be present for collective responsibility: I must be held responsible for something I have not done, and the reason for my responsibility must be my membership in a group (a collective) which no voluntary act of mine can dissolve, that is, a membership which is utterly unlike a business partnership which I can dissolve at will…This kind of responsibility is always political…[There is] a dividing line between political (collective) responsibility, on one side, and moral and/or legal (personal) guilt, on the other…In the center of moral considerations of human conduct stands the self; in the center of political considerations of conduct stands the world."

Basically Arendt is making the point that no moral or personal attitude to things we have not done absolve us of responsibility for these things, and that we have a collective responsibility as human beings to deal with them…something we probably already knew in the case of climate change, except that now we all are both [politically] responsible for past errors and [morally] for errors made now. This essay was written in 1968.

Three years later, in 1971, Arendt published “Thinking and Moral Considerations” which helps me when considering the climate crisis as an example of a failure to think, Arendt’s definition of evil. “…[Eichmann] was neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.”

It is difficult to summarize Arendt since the points she makes follow one another, but in this essay she concludes

"Thinking in its noncognitive, nonspecialized sense as a natural need of human life, the actualization of the difference given in consciousness, is not a prerogative of the few but an ever-present faculty of everybody; by the same token, inability to think is not the 'prerogative' of those many who lack brain power but the ever-present possibility for everybody—scientists, scholars, and other specialists in mental enterprises not excluded—to shun that intercourse with oneself whose possibility and importance Socrates first discovered (i.e., ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’). We were here not concerned with wickedness, with which religion and literature have tried to come to terms, but with evil; not with sin and the great villains who became the negative heroes in literature and usually acted out of envy and resentment, but with the nonwicked everybody who has no special motives and for this reason is capable of infinite evil…

For the thinking ego and its experience, conscience, which ‘fills a man full of obstacles,’ is a side effect. And it remains a marginal affair for society at large except in emergencies. For thinking as such does society little good, much less than the thirst for knowledge in which it is used as an instrument for other purposes. It does not create values, it will not find out, once and for all what ‘the good’ is, and it does not confirm but rather dissolves accepted rules of conduct. Its political and moral significance comes out only in those rare moments in history when ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” when 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity.’

At these moments, thinking ceases to be a marginal affair in political matters. When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes, those who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join is conspicuous and thereby becomes a kind of action.”

Please forgive my extended quotes which, out of context, may not make much sense. However, I am trying to carry you along with my thinking about the looming climate crisis, of which the approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline from the tar sands of Canada to the Gulf of Mexico seems the most egregious folly. One simply has to finally take a stand, and this is mine. It seems the scientific “logic” that goes along with approvals of this sort is what got us here in the first place. Perhaps a more wholistic view is in order at this time.

To get back to this collection of Arendt’s essays, she wrote several at the time of massive upheaval in America, and though she did not address the pressing issue of resource depletion at that time, she did address issues of race, and the integration of schools. It is enlightening (exciting, even) and not really all that obscure to follow her arguments that school children were being forced into the front line positions of fighting racial discrimination, and that this was an(other) example of the failure of government to provide reasonable leadership and protection for the people they “served.”

What I come away with is Arendt disclaiming any particular sorcery when it comes to “thinking.” This is the right, indeed the obligation, of any human. We have not been doing ourselves, our community, our world any good by ignoring what was given. Thinking requires that we stop and think. We cannot think and do things at the same time. The point Arendt makes again and again is that we must think in order to avoid doing evil.

If you are interested and missed my earlier review of This Changes Everything, check it out here.


You can buy this book here: Tweet