Sacred Trash (15 page)

Because parchment was scarce in the early Middle Ages, scribes would often recycle it. Old writing no longer in demand would be scraped away with a pumice stone or the edge of a knife, and the relatively clean if not quite pristine surface that resulted would be used for a newer and presumably more important, or at least more urgent, work. (The English
word encodes that process in the fossil poetry of its etymology: Greek
palin,
“again,” and
psaein,
“to rub.”) Normally a palimpsest contains two strata, though on at least one Geniza occasion we find three. “There is nothing that does not leave its mark, however, in this serious world of ours,” noted Margaret, and parchment, like paper, has a memory—and secrets—of its own. With expertise and considerable effort, and sometimes with the help of an “ill-scented” ammonium and hydrogen sulfide–based reagent (from which the common stink bomb is made), or simply with “the action of common air,” scholars were able to coax these words out of hiding.

Enlisting the help of his generally skeptical mentor, the eminent sixty-two-year-old Cambridge Orientalist R. L. Bensly, Burkitt examined the twins’ photographic reproductions of the Sinai palimpsest and confirmed Agnes’s assessment of its importance. But the grainy photographs only whet their collective appetite for the thing itself, and soon Burkitt and his wife were invited to join a small group the Giblews were assembling for a return expedition to Sinai to prepare a complete transcription of the codex. All this was part of the twins’ sense of their larger mission, which Margaret would later describe in terms that also suited, to a tee, the work that the layered world of the Cairo Geniza would require. It is, she said, “like mending broken chain … which is of more use than making a few feet of new chain, as it makes all the existing links more useful.”

Now far more experienced, Burkitt was again drawn into the force field of palimpsestic erasure, in part by the charismatic Schechter, in part by accident. It seems that his wife, the socially adroit and cameo-pretty Amy Persis Burkitt, had attended one of Mrs. Schechter’s “afternoon at Homes” and spoken there with Mr. Schechter, who had gone on and on about “the wonders of the Geniza” and urged her to come have a look at the hoard in the library. Back at her own home, she told her husband about Schechter’s offer, and of his fervor, and said that Burkitt had
“better go and see.” Which he did, though he seems not to have made much of the mounds of Geniza rags until, just as he was about to leave the sorting room, Schechter casually gestured toward a certain box, saying that it contained Greek fragments. Burkitt picked up the one on top and stared at it, trying to bring what he saw into focus. Tattoo-like signs covered both sides of the parchment, with the thick Hebrew upper writing obscuring the Greek beneath it. After a few minutes Burkitt ventured an opinion: “This is very important,” he said, noting that the text was an early Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. The enthusiastic though equally overwhelmed and overworked Schechter had his doubts, but he urged Burkitt to take the whole lot away with him, give the fragments a thorough examination, and—if in fact they did contain something of substance—to edit them as soon as possible. Perhaps because he was so excited, Burkitt crashed his bicycle on his way home and, as he tells it, “while semi-conscious … was haunted by the fear that the precious fragments had been destroyed in the mix up.”

But they had survived for more than a thousand years, and they would survive Burkitt’s bike crash. And so he got down to the job of editing three tawny 12 × 9–inch leaves of vellum that were, he thought, “of substance.” They made—and still make—a striking impression. Often it seems as though the surface of the parchment, like soil, had just given way under great pressure, the words forced out of their matrix by the weight (in fact the corrosive effect) of the ink’s iron gall, if not by the force of the words themselves. There is, as a result, something distinctly ominous about this arena of inscription, where so many letters are pitched at the edge of these gashes in history’s skin, while others are already lost forever, having slid into oblivion. The Hebrew is a sooty black—its characters tight but highly articulated, their diamond-like serifs sharp—and it arrays itself like a marching band, brass blaring and drums pounding, as it struts across this fifteen-hundred-year-old leathery field. The faint and far less legible Greek, meanwhile, floats upside
down beneath it, as though below the surface of a pond. What looks like stains from moisture on the pages makes it seem, paradoxically, as though the parchment had been burnt.

(
Photo Credit 6.1
)

Schechter guessed that the Hebrew text was liturgical, “in a hand [from] the 11th century”—probably a hymn for the Sabbath—and all eyes turned to the Greek, which Burkitt recognized as passages from a late-fifth- or early-sixth-century copy of a second-century
C.E
. translation of the biblical Book of Kings. Their translator, Aquila, was a convert to Judaism who had married into the pagan emperor Hadrian’s
family and spent most of his adult life in Rome and Jerusalem, where he joined the Christians before converting to Judaism. In Jewish circles he was, according to the Talmud, a disciple of the great rabbi Akiva. Though Burkitt realized that it was highly likely they would find more palimpsests, “the critical interest of these few leaves is so great,” he would explain, “that it seems a pity to delay their publication.” By the end of that first year of feverish sorting—1897—he had seen into print an edition of the
Fragments of the Books of Kings According to the Translation of Aquila,
which included astonishingly vivid facsimiles of the palimpsests themselves.

The translation’s importance was, on the whole, historical: Aquila’s version of the Bible had been widely used by Greek-speaking Jews, and the Church Father Origen had placed it closest to the Hebrew in his compendium of six scriptural translations known as the Hexapla (the sixfold work) because of its extreme literalism, which lent it an air of authenticity, even as it also made for awkward reading: “It is written in a Greek more uncouth than has ever before issued from the Cambridge University Press,” Burkitt noted, offering by way of example his own English rendering made from Aquila’s calque-like Greek for 2 Kings 23:25: “And like him did not come to pass to his face a king who returned unto Jehovah in all his heart and in all his soul and in all his muchness according to every law of Moses, and after him arose not like him.”

To be fair, Aquila’s aim wasn’t to produce a work of art; he wanted to make a Greek version of scripture that would be so faithful to the original register, its syntax and its every particle—all of which were of paramount importance for Jewish exegesis—that it could be read more or less as the rabbis read Hebrew. In other words, Aquila’s translation was, as Burkitt put it, “a colossal crib,” and he concluded that the underwriting must have been used by Greek-speaking Jews in a Fustat synagogue before it was scraped away and replaced by the Hebrew.

Burkitt’s hunch that other layered manuscripts would be found was soon borne out, and three years later Charles Taylor’s
Hebrew-Greek Cairo Genizah Palimpsests from the Taylor-Schechter Collection
comprised selections from Aquila’s rendering of Psalms and, among other things, almost-erased pages of the New Testament. Like Burkitt’s volume, Taylor’s provided first-rate facsimiles of the manuscripts. In a barely visible seventh-century scribal hand, the sloping uppercase Greek letters look like the palest traces of an ancient game of tick-tack-toe concealed in what Schechter called the vellum’s “depths and under-currents.” Above these quiet glyphs, again, the Hebrew regiments appear in parade formation.

And there the matter stood—with the published palimpsests now on display for the entire world to see.

Or not to see. Although the finds and publications were announced in both the London
Times
and the
New York Times,
it would be almost twenty years before anyone would bother to have a close look at the louder “upper writing,” which was, after all, as Taylor made clear on the very first page of his
Genizah Palimpsests
volume, “not without interest.”

I
f ever a scholar was destined to work with palimpsests, it was Israel Davidson. By the time he was born in 1870, in the predominantly Jewish Lithuanian town of Yanova (near Kovno), his parents had already lost twelve children. Fearing the evil eye, they refused to use their son’s real name, which they planned to reveal to him only once he’d safely reached “manhood.” For the time being they would simply call him “Alter” or “Hayyim,” Yiddish for “old” and Hebrew for “life.” The strategy worked, but only partly. While the child survived, his parents died before the boy had reached his fifth birthday, and so young Alter (the little old one) was sent to live with relatives in the much larger city of Grodno. He describes his childhood surroundings as “medieval” and life at the famous Slobodka Yeshiva in terms that also anticipate his future engagement with layered texts and their merger of generations on the page: “A hundred young men bent over a hundred old folios, declaiming
words that were uttered centuries ago, … this is the Jewish army gathered from various parts of the Pale to defend the old faith. It is an army of Peace.… Their mission is not to attack but to defend. They are not bent on conquering worlds, but on conquering themselves.”

When he turned seventeen, Alter was drafted by that other army in his life—the czar’s—and his uncle and aunt arranged for him to be smuggled out of the country along a kind of Jewish underground railroad. Following their instructions, he headed for New York, via Hamburg, carrying a pack containing a down pillow, changes of underwear and shirts, a prayer shawl and phylacteries, and a coffeepot with a cup (lest he have to drink from a
treif
receptacle). He also had money with which to bribe the guards he’d inevitably encounter, and “a few extra rubles sewn in his coat.”

Having forded a stream and lost his cup, endured two homeless weeks in Germany waiting for his ship to come in, and then undergone a thorough fleecing on board—he survived the seventeen-day passage on water, bread, herring, and whiskey (to combat the seasickness)—in mid-May of 1888, he reached New York. He had a single ruble left in his pocket, a fabricated trade (he was, he would say, a bookbinder), but nothing in the way of official papers—a passport wasn’t necessary at the time—and he still did not have a legal name; at any rate, not one that he knew. The long voyage across the ocean had, however, given him time to think this through, and he’d come up with a reasonable solution. His father was David; he would be Davidson. And he was, above all, a son of Israel.

So began the making of Israel Davidson’s name in America.

But not before he learned to speak English. Still Alter to his friends, the greenhorn with rabbinical ordination quickly found work doing odd jobs for lodging and board on the Lower East Side—chopping wood and working as a street vendor—and soon afterward he enrolled in school. This was hardly your standard English-as-a-foreign-language institute. At the age of eighteen, the ever-thorough scholar-to-be had decided to
enroll in elementary school. He started off in one of the higher grades, but seeing how little he understood, he had himself demoted to first grade and, over the course of the year, worked his way back, mastering the skills required for each level.

At this point, in the summer of 1889, a year into his new name, he was writing letters in a bizarre English, largely derived from a cross-referencing of German, English, and Hebrew Bibles, which produced something that sounded not unlike Burkitt’s rendering of Aquila’s crib of the Hebrew Book of Kings: “Dear friend; In a land of strangers as here, and a condition of poverty and a heart full of sorrow as my, to such a person is the only comfort if he finds a truly friend to whom he shall impart his sorrow thoughts.… Your mortificatious friend, Israel Davidson.”

Six years later he was a graduate of City College, and in 1902, now an American citizen, he completed his PhD at Columbia on “Parody in Jewish Literature.” He worked as a chaplain at Sing Sing for a number of years, tending primarily to petty thieves—not “real criminals,” as he wrote of them. “They were just unfortunate enough to be apprehended.… I have met plenty on the other side of the bars for whom I had less respect.” Then in 1905 the thirty-five-year-old was hired by Solomon Schechter to fill a poorly paying position teaching Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary, and he began his gradual climb up the slippery scholarly ladder. His dissertation was published in 1907, but the turning point in his career came about, as with Burkitt’s discovery of the Aquila, almost by chance.