Sacred Trash (18 page)

The Institute’s director was Heinrich (Hayyim) Brody, a Hungarian-born former chief rabbi of Prague, who also happened to be the world’s leading scholar of medieval Hebrew poetry. Within a short time Brody had hired several gifted young research assistants, including a thirty-year-old
Galician Jew named Menahem Zulay—who had recently transposed his name from the German Billig, meaning “cheap,” to its rough Hebraic equivalent. Like Davidson, Zulay had been orphaned early and raised by an aunt. Barely twenty, he left Poland for Palestine, where he worked in construction before enrolling at a teacher’s seminary in Jerusalem. Not long after taking up a position in the Jezreel Valley, he was approached by Schocken, who, during a visit to Palestine, was seeking among other things a Hebrew tutor for his young children. Zulay, a fellow
Ostjude,
or Eastern European Jew, came highly recommended, and in 1927 Schocken brought him back to Saxony. While instructing the rich man’s children and living awkwardly in his house, Zulay enrolled at the University of Leipzig. Eventually he transferred to Berlin.

When he joined the Institute, the small-framed, mild-mannered young scholar with a soft, open face and an almost secretly potent imagination—along with a fierce patience beaming from within his blue-eyed gaze—had recently completed his doctorate at the University of Bonn under Paul Kahle, a Lutheran Semiticist who had spent six years as a pastor in Cairo, and would go on to become one of the pioneers of Geniza studies. Brody and his other assistants at the Institute concentrated on the Spanish and Ashkenazic material, which added considerably to the work done by nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century German-Jewish scholars; facing east, Kahle’s modest and musically inclined protégé (Zulay’s daughter recalls his delicate voice singing prayers and hymns that accompanied the family’s religious rituals) took up research in “terra incognita”—the Hebrew poetry of late antiquity. This was an area that
had been barely touched, apart from Davidson’s groundbreaking publication, which, Zulay later said, “flashed like lightning across the skies of this scholarly field.”

(
Photo Credit 6.6
)

What that lightning briefly revealed to Zulay, as though in a dream-vision, was the possibility of
much much more:
the gaps in Davidson’s time-eaten manuscript pages filled in; the discovery of Yannai’s poems for the remainder of the Palestinian liturgical cycle; poems by the poets that preceded him and whom he admired, those who followed and perhaps rebelled.… In other words, an entire literature embodying the middle millennium of Jewish poetry’s three-thousand-year history. Far too little was known about that period, said Zulay, though it had given normative Judaism its shape and character. “In my dream,” he wrote, “I see some thirty volumes containing the work of the writers of sacred poetry throughout the generations, those whose hymns now languish in the Geniza.”

Call it, as many did, a vision of dry bones returning to life. Or, to take up an appropriately Egyptian metaphor (courtesy of Schechter’s Cambridge walking companion James Frazer and his monumental
Golden Bough
), a gathering of the limbs of Osiris—the god who had taken the Egyptians into civilization, introducing them to the cultivation of grain and a social structure that would ensure nourishment and sustenance. Osiris spread his message abroad then returned home, only to be murdered and dismembered by envious rivals and kin, who scattered the parts of his body far and wide until his sister, Isis, gathered these severed parts together and, using her sorcery, brought Osiris back to life so that “his genius would be always at work in the world.”

Bones, or limbs, or both, they were lying in Geniza collections around the globe—mostly in Cambridge, but also in Oxford and London and Berlin, Frankfurt and Leningrad, Warsaw, New York, Philadelphia, and Paris—and month by month, week by week, packages containing photostats of these manuscripts were dispatched to the Institute. For five years Zulay’s efforts were concentrated almost solely on this ingathering.
But the pieces of the puzzle were scrambled in a heap that boggled even the very best minds. The work, it seemed, called for an almost impossible combination of vision and patience, passion and science. And perhaps for a kind of Isis-like magic—albeit one born of tremendous labor and prodigious powers of recall. (“Memory,” said Zulay, “is the finest index.”)

For while it was tempting to dive in and cherry-pick one’s way through the chaos—looking for work by major poets in whatever form one might find it and tossing the rest to the side—Zulay realized that this wouldn’t do. He would have to begin at the beginning (like the eighteen-year-old Davidson returning to first grade) and sift through the thousands of copies of fragments with loving care and steady devotion, as he himself put it, likening the work to a sacred task that has no measurable worth and would never come to an end.

“Each photostat is a prayer congealed,” he wrote. “Each page a poem frozen in place. The dust of the generations has to be shaken from them; they have to be woken and revived; and the workers are busy; and a day doesn’t pass without resurrection.… And at the center of [it all] stands Yannai.”

T
he pressures were enormous. The economic crisis of 1929 had put new wind in the sails of the German National Socialist Workers’ Party, and anti-Jewish sentiment was mounting. Department stores in particular (Schocken owned some sixteen of them by then) were singled out as representative of Jewish parasitism, with the Nazi Party platform calling for their immediate communalization and for their being “leased at low rates to small tradesmen.” In 1929 Schocken’s Stuttgart store was attacked by thugs with stink bombs—putting to perverse use the same chemicals the Giblews and Burkitt had employed to help bring the fading foreign past to light; now they were intended to drive it into darkness. And in 1933, Sigmund Freud—who two years earlier had been
awarded Frankfurt’s Goethe Prize, which he considered the culmination of his public life—saw his writing burned in the same city and elsewhere in Germany. Also that year Schocken joined a wave of Jewish intellectuals, as well as their endangered Christian supporters (including Kahle), who had begun to flee; he announced his imminent departure for Jerusalem. Zulay and the Institute followed.

In both Berlin and in Jerusalem, Zulay was painstakingly sorting the fragments that reached him and gradually beginning to see the figure in the carpet, though he was, he felt, working against the clock and being driven by another sense of time altogether. As he would later write, “It seemed as though it wasn’t me working, but something working within me, some hidden power that was fed at once by hope and despair, and served as a kind of opium during these difficult times. Day after day as I entered the Institute I would forget the outside world entirely, and when I left it [at the end of my workday] I felt like someone emerging from a deep mine who had to let his eyes readjust to the light of the sun.”

The world around him was, in other words, collapsing; but as it crumbled, Zulay constructed—sifting and checking, marking and imagining, and, virtually line by line, reaching back through his own catastrophic historical hour to another era and a transcendent literary force. And his labor was bearing fruit: in 1938,
Piyyutei Yannai
(The Poems of Yannai) was published by Schocken Books. Zulay’s persistence had allowed him to piece together, bit by dispersed and often damaged bit, coherent fragments of some eight hundred poems—a 200 percent increase over Davidson’s finds. Short on frills but long on irony, and in a handsome, dignified format, this last Hebrew volume to be published in Nazi Germany presented to the public a classical Jewish poet of mythic power and stature—precisely what Schocken had hoped for.

Obscure or bizarrely exegetical as the opening sections of the
kerovot
could often be (Yannai takes on topics like the rules of engagement in war and the multitude of cattle possessed by the tribes of Reuben and Gad), other movements of these multipart poems were more accessible.
Even the most sacerdotal of poems—Yannai’s verses about pus, for example—could make way later in the same sequence for a stirring lyric that might, for readers of the day, become emblematic of twentieth-century Jewish suffering. And such was the force and range of this work that publication of these poems in popular Hebrew journals, even as Nazi power closed in, prompted one leading Jerusalem intellectual to liken the discovery of Yannai’s poems to a new midrash by means of which “the Jewish tree of life, with blood spurting from its trunk, has been rejuvenated from its roots.”

In their original context, many of these hymns were intended either to invite the participation of the congregation or simply to arouse its awe. The cadenza-like seventh unit of the
kerova,
for instance—known as the
rahit,
or the runner, because of the striking way in which it employs speed and density of ornament as an embodiment of virtuosity, racing from the past of scripture to the present of the listener—showcased the poet’s musical talents so tangibly that even the sleepy or merely simple members of the audience on the back benches of the synagogue couldn’t help but be drawn in. One particularly stunning example involves a profound commentary on the meaning and eternal relevance of the burning bush in the Book of Exodus (which happened to give the Giblews’ church its symbol and was taken up by Schechter in New York as the JTS emblem). In Yannai’s vision, the heart of the unconsumed flame is understood in supercharged midrashic fashion as the embodiment of the Shekhina, the Divine Presence, or “immanence of God in the world”:

And the angel of the Lord was revealed to him (in the heart of the flame)

  Angel of fire devouring fire

  Fire Blazing through damp and drier

  Fire Candescent in smoke and snow

  Fire Drawn like a crouching lion

  Fire Evolving through shade after shade

  Fateful fire that will not expire

  Gleaming fire that wanders far

  Hissing fire that sends up sparks

  Fire Infusing a swirling gale

  Fire that Jolts to life without fuel

  Fire that’s Kindled and kindles daily

  Lambent fire unfanned by fire

  Miraculous fire flashing through fronds

  Notions of fire like lightning on high

  Omens of fire in the chariots’ wind

  [Pillars of fire in thunder and storm]

  [Quarries of] fire wrapped in a fog

  Raging fire that reaches Sheol

  T[errible fire that Ushers in] cold

  Fire’s Vortex like a Wilderness crow

  Fire eXtending and Yet like a rainbow’s

  Zone of color arching through sky

This sacred fire, as one commentator has noted, comes down from the heavens bearing with it the entire alphabet.

But Yannai could also be powerfully unadorned and tender. One
kerova
develops around a more human figure, the biblical Leah, whose eyes were weak and who was rejected by her husband, Jacob, in favor of her sister, Rachel. Here an analogy to the people of Israel—and in a sense to all who believe—is hauntingly constructed through a modulation of cadence and tone that reaches its lyric peak in the free-flowing form of the poem’s fourth part. Once again the poet holds a literary stethoscope up to a specific narrative moment, making audible its mythic pulse:

  Our eyes are weak with longing for Your love,

  for we are loathed by a hateful foe: