Authors: Adina Hoffman
The letter from the summer of 1129 is found in Goitein,
MS
5, p. 465; Fleischer-Gil,
HaLevi
[Heb], Doc. 19; Raymond Scheindlin,
The Song of the Distant Dove: Judah Halevi’s Pilgrimage
(Oxford, 2008). Scheindlin interprets this differently, dates the letter twelve years later, to 1141, and places it in Alexandria. For yet a third version of the HaLevi chronology, see Joseph Yahalom,
Yehuda Halevi: Poetry and Pilgrimage,
Gabriel Levin, trans., chapter 10 (Jerusalem, 2009).
The line “the dust of the desolate shrine” is from “My Heart Is in the East,” which appears in Cole,
The Dream of the Poem
(the final line is translated differently there). Opinions differ as to when HaLevi was born. The date generally given is c. 1075 (or sometime before 1075). Yahalom and Scheindlin believe that it was closer to 1085. See Schirmann and Fleischer in
The History of Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain
[Heb]; Scheindlin,
The Dove;
Yahalom,
Yehuda Halevi.
The description of HaLevi as “the quintessence … of our country” is found in Goitein,
MS
5: X, D. The notion of the pilgrimage as “an educational and political model” is discussed in Fleischer-Gil,
HaLevi.
HaLevi’s phrase, “all flowers and no fruit,” is discussed in R. Brann, “Judah HaLevi,” in
The Literature of al-Andalus,
María Rosa Menocal, Raymond P. Scheindlin, and Michael Sells, eds. (Cambridge, 2000), and Brann,
The Compunctious Poet.
Citations from the letters (followed by analyses) are drawn from the following sources: “The Sultan’s new ship,” Fleischer-Gil,
HaLevi,
Doc. 40; see also Scheindlin,
The Dove,
pp. 97ff. (Fleischer-Gil, Scheindlin, and Yahalom provide different accounts of when this letter was written.) “Outwardly I participated,” Fleischer-Gil,
HaLevi,
Doc. 41; Scheindlin,
The Dove,
p. 103. “Put an end to this headache,” Fleischer-Gil,
HaLevi,
Doc. 42; Scheindlin,
The Dove,
pp. 100–101.
“Burn after reading!”
Fleischer-Gil,
HaLevi,
Doc. 48 (see 49 as well); Scheindlin,
The Dove,
pp. 135–36. “HaLevi is … aboard an ‘oversized nutshell,’ ” Fleischer-Gil,
HaLevi,
Doc. 50; Scheindlin,
The Dove,
pp. 141ff; also Yehuda Halevi,
Poems from the Diwan,
Gabriel Levin, trans. (London, 2002). “The ships bound for al-Andalus,” Fleischer-Gil,
HaLevi,
Doc. 51. “HaLevi sailed on Wednesday,” Scheindlin,
The Dove,
p. 149; Halfon’s letter was written five days after the ship sailed—that is, on Monday the nineteenth. “The memory of a saint is a blessing,” Fleischer-Gil,
HaLevi,
Doc. 54; Scheindlin,
The Dove,
pp. 150–51. “The gates of Jerusalem,” Fleischer-Gil,
HaLevi,
Doc. 53; Scheindlin,
The Dove,
pp. 249–52. “Modest pilgrimages,” Yahalom,
Yehuda Halevi,
chapter 24; see also Yahalom’s “Yehuda HaLevi and the Western Wind,”
Haaretz,
May 20, 1999. “Reasonably convincing evidence,” Fleischer-Gil,
HaLevi,
chapter 7. As for where HaLevi was buried, see Scheindlin,
The Dove,
pp. 150, 276. On the condition of the manuscript telling of HaLevi’s demise, see Fleischer-Gil,
HaLevi,
Doc. 53; and Scheindlin,
The Dove,
pp. 249–52.
The larger question prompted by HaLevi’s activity in Egypt is: Why was the poet writing Andalusian-style poems at all if he was, as Fleischer says, rejecting the Andalusian cultural ethos outright? Was he trying to make a nationalist statement with his decision to settle in the Land of Israel, or, as Scheindlin argues, was the pilgrimage private and spiritual? See Fleischer, “The Essence of Our Land” [Heb], and Fleischer-Gil,
HaLevi,
p. 233; Scheindlin,
The Dove,
pp. 4, 155–56, 170, and 277.
Information about Fleischer is drawn from a variety of sources, including interviews from
Yediot aharonot
(by Zisi Stavi, March 20, 1987, and by Penina Meizlisch, July 25, 1975); obituaries and memorial notices in the
New York Times
(by Ari Goldman, Aug. 1, 2006) and
Haaretz
(by Ariel Hirschfeld, Aug. 2, 2006; by Uri Dromi, Aug. 3, 2006; by Yehoshua Granat, Aug. 4, 2006; and by Michael Handelsatz, Aug. 11, 2006); personal page, the Israeli Academy of Arts and Sciences,
http://www.academy.ac.il/data/persons_data/55/EzraF1.pdf
; Shulamit Elizur, “From the Depths” [Heb],
Madda’ei haYahadut
43, 2006; Shulamit Elizur, “The Scholarly Project of Ezra Fleischer: General Observations” [Heb], unpublished article, 2006 (quoted by permission of the author); and Yehoshua Granat, “Diverse Colors, Threads of Delicate Echoes, an Authenticity Deep and Sharp: On Ezra Fleischer’s Studies of Medieval Hebrew Secular Poetry” [Heb],
Madda’ei haYahadut
45, 2009. Fleischer stopped publishing poetry after he immigrated to Israel.
In “Diverse Colors” [Heb] Granat discusses Fleischer’s complex relationship to the Hebrew poetry of Spain. See also H. Schirmann,
Yehosef HaNagid: The Tragedy of a Jewish Statesman
[Heb], with a foreword by Ezra Fleischer (Jerusalem, 1982). Fleischer’s astonishing response to the Hebron massacre—“A Cry”—appeared in
Haaretz,
March 25, 1994. Our thanks to Yehoshua Granat for alerting us to this article.
Schirmann’s avoidance of political and social commentary is apparent in H. Schirmann, “The Study of Hebrew Secular Poetry” [Heb],
Sedarim: me’asef sofrei Eretz Israel.
See also Tova Rosen and Eli Yassif, “The Study of Hebrew Literature of the Middle Ages,” in
The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies,
M. Goodman, ed. (Oxford, 2002).
For more on Ben Saruk and Ibn Avitor, see Schirmann,
The History of Hebrew Poetry in Muslim Spain
[Heb]; Fleischer, “On the Early History of Our Poetry in Spain: The Secular and Liturgical Poetry of R. Menahem ben Saruk” [Heb],
Asufot
2, 1988; “On the Poetry of R. Ibn Avitor” [Heb],
Asufot
4, 1990, as well as Fleischer’s doctoral dissertation,
The Works of Yosef ibn Avitor
[Heb] (The Hebrew University, 1967); and “Towards an Early History of Secular Hebrew Poetry in Spain,” in
Culture and Society
[Heb], Ben-Sasson, Bonfil, and Hacker, eds. See also Cole,
The Dream of the Poem.
The phrase “a fourfold miracle” is Fleischer’s, from “Early Hebrew Poetry in the Cairo Geniza” [Heb]. “The study of the Geniza” is from the same essay. Shulamit Elizur discusses Fleischer’s work as a whole in “The Scholarly Project of Ezra Fleischer” [Heb]. See also Y. Granat,
Haaretz,
Aug. 11, 2006. Fleischer’s articles on the subject are collected in
The Hebrew Poetry of Spain and Its Offshoots
[Heb], S. Elizur and T. Be’eri, eds. (Jerusalem, 2010). In “A Triple Jubilee” [Heb], Fleischer mentions “the tens of thousands of hitherto unknown poems” released by the Geniza. The image of their ancient authors all around him is from S. Elizur, “Poetry Is in the Details” [Heb].
We are extremely grateful to Ayala Gordon, Elon Goitein, and Ofra Rosner for permission to quote from their father S. D. Goitein’s letters and journals, which are in their private possession. The letter that begins “SECRET” is dated Oct. 8, 1955.
For more on Baneth, see, for example, Goitein, “David Hartwig (Zvi) Baneth, 1893–1973,”
Studia Orientalia Memoriae D. H. Baneth,
J. Blau et al., eds. (Jerusalem, 1979); Hava Lazarus-Yafe, “The Transplantation of Islamic Studies from Europe to the Yishuv and Israel,” in
The Jewish Discovery of Islam,
Martin Kramer, Menachem Milson, eds. (Tel Aviv, 1999).
Goitein’s published account of the discovery of the New Series appears in Goitein, “Involvement in Geniza Research,” in
Religion in a Religious Age,
Goitein, ed. (Cambridge, 1974). The description in his diary is dated Oct. 7, 1955. For another vivid description of the work with the New Series’ crates and their contents, see Hayyim Schirmann’s radio interview (notes to chapter 9), where he tells of his first encounter with the new finds in the summer of 1957: “Immediately after my arrival, Miss Skilliter brought me to the library’s storeroom, and before my wonder-struck eyes stretched a long row of thirty tall crates, full of Geniza fragments, mostly to the brim.… ” A brief examination was enough to convince Schirmann that the discovery was every bit as valuable as the Old Series and that the crates had to be gone through systematically. “Examination of this sort called for qualities normally found in a natural-born archeologist. Call it an ability to take pleasure in drudge work in the fullest sense of the term. A willingness to swallow clouds of dust which rose up after the slightest motion of the hand inside the Geniza crates, [and] a power of endurance, because one had to sit with the crates for weeks on end. I didn’t have these traits, but as no one else had come to [sort the literary fragments], I had no choice but to lock myself in with the enormous crates and send up the dust that had settled in them. I washed myself several times a day, and still couldn’t completely get rid of the traces of the Geniza.” Schirmann’s account recalls that of Schechter in Cairo in 1897 and his coining of the unforgettable term—
“Genizahschmutz.”
The comparisons of the Geniza to garbage are as follows: “contents of a huge waste paper basket,” D. S. Margoliouth, “The Zadokites,”
The Expositor
8/32, Aug. 1913; “nothing of any interest,” Reif,
A Jewish Archive
(he is quoting the library assistant B. C. Nightingale); “I have … once or twice rummaged,” A. F. Schofield, “Librarian’s Report: 4 April 1944,” CUL ULIB 6/4/1/104.
For more on Judeo-Arabic, see Joshua Blau,
The Emergence and Linguistic Background of Judaeo-Arabic: A Study of the Origins of Neo-Arabic and Middle Arabic
(Jerusalem, 1999); Goitein,
MS
1, introduction; Ghosh,
In an Antique Land;
“Judeo-Arabic,”
Encyclopedia of Islam.
For the Carlyle quote, see Thomas Carlyle,
On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History
(New York, 1888). See Starr’s chapter on “The History of Great Men,” in
Catholic Israel,
for more on Schechter’s relationship to Carlyle’s notion of history. Simha Assaf’s contribution to Geniza research is described in Goitein, “What Would Jewish and General History Benefit by a Systematic Publication of the Documentary Geniza Papers?,”
Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research
23, 1954; Reif,
A Jewish Archive;
Goitein,
MS
1, introduction. His role in naming Rehavia’s streets is described in Amnon Rimon,
Rehavia: A Neighborhood in Jerusalem
[Heb] (Jerusalem, 1998). Goitein calls Baneth the “father of the Geniza project” in “S. D. Goitein: Scientific Projects/Instructions in Case of a Fatal Accident,” dated July 25, 1961, which is held in the SDG Geniza Lab, 2J.1.2, NLI.
Biographical information about S. D. Goitein and overviews of his work come from Goitein, “The Life Story of a Scholar,” in Robert Attal,
A Bibliography of the Writing of Prof. Shelomo Dov Goitein
(Jerusalem, 1975/2000), and from the bibliography itself; S. D. Goitein, “Involvement in Geniza Research”; Ayala Gordon,
Shelomo Dov Goitein and Shmuel Yosef Agnon: Criticism and Letters, 1919–1970
[Heb] (Jerusalem, 2008);
The History of the Goitein Family
[Heb] (Jerusalem, 2008); Ayala Gordon,
Between Jerusalem and Neve-Yam
[Heb]; Avraham Udovitch, preface to Goitein’s
MS
5; Mark Cohen, “Shelomo Dov Goitein,” in
The American Philosophical Year Book,
1987; Mark Cohen, “Goitein, the Geniza, and Muslim History,”
Middle Eastern Lectures,
no. 4, Moshe Dayan Center, Tel Aviv University, 2001; Eric Ormsby, “The ‘Born Schulmeister,’ ”
The New Criterion
22/1, Sept. 2003; Mordechai Akiva Friedman, “A Note on the Contribution of S. D. Goitein to the Interdisciplinary Study of Judaeo-Arabic Culture” [Heb],
Sefunot
5/20, 1991; Mordechai Friedman, “Prof. S. D. Goitein, Man and Scholar” [Heb],
Yedion haIgud haOlami leMadda’ei haYahadut
26, 1986; Joel Kraemer, “Goitein and His Mediterranean Society” [Heb],
Zmanim,
no. 34–35, summer 1990; Gideon Libson, “Hidden Worlds and Open Shutters: S. D. Goitein between Judaism and Islam,” in
The Jewish Past Revisited,
Myers and Ruderman, eds.; Franz Rosenthal, “Shlomo Dov Goitein,”
Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research
53, 1986; Avraham Udovitch et al.,
Shelomo Dov Goitein, 1900–1985
(Princeton, 1985); Steven M. Wasserstrom, “Apology for S. D. Goitein: An Essay,” in
A Faithful Sea: The Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean, 1200–1700
, Adnan A. Husain and K. E. Fleming, eds. (Oxford, 2007); Shaul Shaked, “S. D. Goitein: Scholar of the Historical Cooperation between Judaism and Islam” [Heb],
Pe’amim
22, 1985; Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, “Shlomo Dov Goitein—Scholar Extraordinary,”
Judaism
33/3, 1984; Moshe Gil, “Shlomo Dov Goitein, 1900–1985: A Mediterranean Scholar,”
Mediterranean Historical Review
1/1, 1986; Noam A. Stillman, “From Oriental Studies and Wissenschaft des Judentums to Interdisciplinarity” [Heb], and Miriam Frankel, “The Historiography of the Jews in the Middle Ages—Landmarks and Prospects” [Heb], both in
Pe’amim
92, 2002;
Studies in Judaism and Islam: Presented to Shelomo Dov Goitein on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday by His Students, Colleagues and Friends,
Shelomo Morag, Issachar Ben-Ami, Norman A. Stillman, eds. (Jerusalem, 1981); and interviews (conducted throughout 2008–9) with Ayala and Amirav Gordon, Elon and Harriet Goitein, Mark Cohen, Joshua Blau, Stefan Reif; e-mail exchanges with Mordechai Friedman, Norman Stillman, Paula Sanders. Goitein’s arrival in Palestine with Gershom Scholem is described by the latter in
From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth,
Harry Zohn, trans. (New York, 1980).