Sacred Trash (22 page)
Authors: Adina Hoffman
A few days later, Elkan Adler wrote to Cyrus Adler, confirming the shipping and insurance arrangements, and admitting his own sadness: “I need not tell you that it is a great wrench,” he wrote, “and I feel as though I were giving away an only daughter in marriage[,] but it is a comfort to think that she will find a happy home and that she will continue to bear my name.”
Cyrus Adler was quick to reply: “I fully understand that it is very hard for you to be suddenly separated from your Library to which you
have devoted so much paternal love and care and which you have brought up for more than a third of a century. But you can be sure that your ‘daughter’ will find a proper home. The union with her younger cousin will be very beneficial for both.”
America was the setting for this bookish wedding, and, as it happens, the scene of various family feuds that had marked the Jewish community there for much of its young life—and that also had echoes in the Geniza.…
A Gallery of Heretics
O
f all the riddles the Geniza offers,” Schechter wrote in 1901, as he prepared himself for the encounter with a fractured but burgeoning American Judaism and appraised a Hebrew scrap he’d come across by an upstart eighteen-year-old Persian Jewish immigrant to Babylonia, “this is one of the most puzzling.” Its six pages contained parts of a loosely cadenced, rhymed expository work, and its young author’s limitations as a writer “make his style,” according to Schechter, “occasionally forced and even unintelligible.” It was content, however, rather than eloquence, that drew Schechter into the puzzle of this not-quite-prose, and what he found there were the words of a shockingly skeptical ninth-century Jewish critic of the foundational Jewish document—the Bible. As though he’d been reading a mix of mid-twentieth-century literary New Criticism and a rationalist’s guide to theology, the seemingly fearless neophyte calls into doubt the integrity of scripture on both textual and moral grounds, complaining that it lacks clarity and requires constant explanation, contains needless details and repetitions, often contradicts itself with regard to major considerations, and, worst of all, presents an implied ethics that are “inferior and in no way compatible with the moral nature of God”—whom our doubter claims is depicted in scripture as a capricious, double-dealing dispenser of punishment. Schechter also notes the “jarring” and “irreverent and irritable” tone of
the questions. It is unlikely, he adds, that the writer’s Jewishness was more than superficial.
This anonymous contrarian appears, however, to have had fellow believers in disbelief, and they had a teacher—who has also been delivered from the limbo of the Geniza and into a kind of tag-team denominational debate. The teacher’s redeemer was the same Israel Davidson who, as a teenager, had crossed the ocean to reach New York, learned English, and entered into the Geniza’s orbit when Schechter brought him to JTS.
In the summer of 1914—after he’d found the first wispy trace of the circa sixth-century liturgical poet Yannai in a Geniza fragment—Davidson, we’ll recall, reversed direction and crossed the ocean once again, this time heading for Cambridge, where he was to spend a few weeks squinting his way through the University Library’s Taylor-Schechter collection. We don’t know for certain what he hoped to find there—though his record of publication prior to the trip, along with his wife’s comments in her memoir, suggest that he was “especially anxious” to see what the collection might offer and most likely had liturgical poetry (which is to say, Yannai and company) on the brain. In a small book he published the following year, Davidson notes that he had the “privilege of examining every part of the Genizah collection,” especially the “numerous fragments which had remained unclassified.”
While the grail of Yannai’s long-lost poetry eluded him on that round, Davidson did find something smaller and off to the side that turned out to be among his most important discoveries: a polemical work composed in response to the person scholars now believe served as the model or even mentor for Schechter’s doubter. His odd name as it has reached us is Hiwi al-Balkhi—which is to say, he came from Balkh, or Old Bactria, then Persia and today northern Afghanistan. (There is considerable confusion over the name, with some scholars suggesting that Hiwi—a corruption, it seems, of the Persian “Haywayhi”—was a nickname that may have carried overtones of an Arabic word meaning “snake,” or “heretic.”) In the Middle Ages, Balkh was famous as the birthplace of
Zarathustra, the founder of Zoroastrianism, and the region was fertile ground for a number of religion-splintering sectarian movements, including various Shiite strains of Islam and one quasi-Jewish sect that sought to shift the Sabbath from Saturday to Wednesday(!)—the day the sun was created in the Book of Genesis. Prior to the nineteenth century, Hiwi al-Balkhi’s name had been mentioned only a handful of times in the entirety of Jewish literature—always by writers who vehemently objected to his line of thought—and nothing of his work itself remained.
But here he almost was, rising revenant-like up out of the muffling mounds of Geniza documents. The fierce argument Davidson had stumbled on was with one of the most formidable Jewish minds of the age—tenth-century Jewry’s greatest leader and most versatile thinker and writer, Saadia ben Yosef, who was, among many other things, the last person to have quoted from the Hebrew Ben Sira before it disappeared off the medieval radar. Born in 882, in the Egyptian district of Fayyum just south of Cairo, Saadia was appointed to the position of Gaon (Eminence), or head of the Babylonian academy of Sura, in 928. At once a conservative and profoundly revolutionary figure, it was Saadia Gaon, as he came to be known, who, more than any other individual, brought medieval Eastern Judaism into the “modern world” of Islamic civilization—“transform[ing] almost beyond recognition the intellectual and literary agendas of the cultural elite” of his day. As he did so, he fearlessly took on challenge after heretical challenge.
The scrap that Davidson had fished from the Cambridge collection was a small but tantalizing part of Saadia’s polemical reply to some two hundred cutting questions that Hiwi al-Balkhi had launched at the Bible and at Judaism sometime in the ninth century, which is to say, during a period of considerable religious ferment. Saadia’s thirty-one extant answers—composed before he became Gaon, and in a deft Hebrew that Davidson misidentified as rhymed prose—employed the standard prosodic components of the verse of the time, including an elaborate system of both alphabetical and signature acrostics, in addition to rhyme. It
was, in other words, a kind of poetry, and it long stood as the earliest example of nonliturgical Hebrew verse, if of a merely didactic sort. In addition to being a highly influential and visionary philosopher, linguist, and commentator on scripture (which he translated into Arabic)—in many ways a much more original, critical, and attractive thinker than Maimonides—Saadia was also an innovative
payyetan,
the extent and quality of whose literary output was revealed only with the discovery of the Geniza and the work of Davidson, Menahem Zulay, and others. The tough-talking polemic Davidson had found presented him and other scholars with something like a Jewish game of
Jeopardy!
They had a set of succinct if heady answers; now they had to imagine the questions that prompted them.
As they worked out these equations, the contours of Hiwi’s radical thought and doctrine began to emerge.
Judging from what we hear in the not necessarily faithful echo of Saadia’s answers, Hiwi appears in his “book of questions” to have presented an eccentric, freethinking, and occasionally sneering take on the faith of his forefathers—which he may or may not have sought to leave. Deeply influenced by Zoroastrianism, certain elements of Persian philosophy, Christian and Islamic heretical doctrine, and possibly by the more controversial Jewish midrashim, he posed questions that were seen to “raise the ax over the essential principles” of Judaism as that religion emerges in the Bible and in the oral tradition: Why did God make man vulnerable to suffering? Why should the blood of animals be acceptable to Him as atonement? What would an omnipotent deity have had to fear from the builders of the Tower of Babel? Why did God choose just a single people (the Jews) and give the other nations over to the care of the angels? Why does the Bible present so many contradictory verses? Can’t the biblical miracles be explained rationally? (For example, the Red Sea wasn’t split supernaturally; Moses simply understood its ebb and flow, while the Egyptian troops did not. And manna wasn’t sent from heaven; it’s the Persian food
tarjabin,
which is found in those parts of the world. Et
cetera.) In short, Hiwi seems to be saying, what kind of religion is this anyway? And what right-thinking person could believe in its scripture?
Hiwi’s own theological position can be summarized along the following distinctly nonnormative Jewish lines: God, at least as He emerges in the (problematic) Bible that represents Him, is neither all powerful, all present, nor One, and—moreover—He isn’t always Godlike! He engages in magic and is often neither just nor trustworthy. God did
not
create the world
in the beginning—
the world existed before Creation, and it was hardly perfect. God implanted evil in man, and He is also responsible for barbarism (sacrifice and the mutilation of circumcision). In his radical critique, and maybe also in his muttering recalcitrance, Hiwi was, as one modern scholar has put it, “a whole millennium ahead of his time.”
B
ut why was Saadia bothering to respond to Hiwi nearly half a century after the Bactrian Bible-basher had drawn up his questions? What troubled the Gaon so that he would risk bringing still more attention to Hiwi’s heretical line of thought?
The later medieval literature reports that Hiwi composed a kind of expurgated version of scripture, shorn of “objectionable” passages, and that this was taught in schools. While modern scholarship rejects the existence of Hiwi’s alternative commonsense Bible, it does leave open the possibility that he inspired just such a work by someone else, and that
this
Bible-for-doubters (perhaps by the skeptic Schechter had plucked from his crates) may have been the object of Saadia’s rhymed, proto-rap-like assault. A more plausible explanation, however, lies in the evidence that derives in part from Geniza finds and indicates that Hiwi belonged to the burgeoning cluster of sectarian figures whose teachings in the second half of the eighth century had begun to creep across the periphery of the Jewish world (especially along the Persian frontier, where Hiwi was raised), and that these heretical movements had come to pose a serious challenge to rabbinic Judaism, which was gradually emerging
as the mainstream expression of the faith. Saadia had spent the first thirty years of his life in Egypt and Palestine, where sects of this sort had attracted a following, and he was perhaps more alert than others to their danger.
Some seventy years after Davidson’s discovery of Saadia’s response, the Geniza coughed up one of the many quiet surprises that it holds in store for those who tend to its treasures like ants—patiently constructing networks of tunnels and routes along which finds and supplies might move: in 1982, a Jerusalem scholar working with microfilms of Geniza manuscripts happened on a fragment containing eleven lines of Hiwi’s original composition. The page appears to come from yet another work written in response to Hiwi’s dissenting position, and it quotes verbatim three of his questions (attributing one of these directly to him). The find confirms that Hiwi did indeed write in Hebrew, and for all intents and purposes employed the same style that Saadia mirrored in his reply. As with so many of the Geniza discoveries, this one too had passed through numerous hands without being recognized, despite the fact that Hiwi’s name (spelled with a small difference) appeared clearly on the page, in large Hebrew characters cast into Judeo-Arabic: “And about the story of the Egyptian sorcerers, Hiwahi al-Balkhi said …”
I
n early November of 1901, the same year that Schechter published his article on the Bible doubter, he wrote to his friend Mayer Sulzberger in Philadelphia, complaining bitterly about “the dragging and haggling” of dealing with the board of directors at the Seminary as he negotiated his new position there, which he says he would gladly surrender before having even taken it up—“but for the fact that I want to live among Jews and … hope … to have, God willing, some share in shaping the future of Judaism.” Then he pulls the latest rabbit out of his Geniza hat and mentions that he has just identified large fragments of a sectarian manuscript and that, again, “God willing,” he “intend[s] to edit one day a volume
of fragments forming
my Heretic’s Gallery which will surprise the world.
[But] I am now keeping back the best things for America as I think that such publication will give the Seminary a certain prestige.” A full nine years later, settled at JTS and still bickering with the board over institutional matters, he finally saw into print the manuscript he’d mentioned to Sulzberger, alongside another, older one, in a book called
Documents of Jewish Sectaries.
The contents of this volume hadn’t been known before the discovery of the Geniza and were, it seemed, related to the origins of a much larger Jewish schismatic movement, the most threatening of the age. This latter group was the foe at which Saadia had aimed his rhetorical crossbow again and again in fragments found among the Fustat scraps: Karaism.