"As long as the Bible lives, my name shall not die!" proclaimed Solomon Schechter to his wife concerning his discovery of the long- lost Hebrew Ben Sira (Ecclesiasticus) among the documents brought from Cairo, Egypt, to Cambridge, England, by the twin sisters Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson. We may confidently say that as long as Genizah study lives, the name Stefan C. Reif shall not die. For almost forty years, ever since he was appointed as a junior librarian at Cambridge University Library in 1973, Stefan Reif has been synonymous with the Cambridge collection of manuscripts and fragments from the Cairo Genizah, that repository of discarded written materials, from the highest brow literature to the lowest brow receipt, discovered at the end of the nineteenth century and removed to libraries around the world, most notably to Cambridge. The present volume is composed of the proceedings of the 2007 conference honoring Reif on the occasion of his retirement as the director of the Cambridge Geniza Research Unit which he founded (one of the editors, Ben Outhwaite, who provides an appreciation of Reif, is his successor in that position). It is a fitting homage to someone who has contributed so much to the advance of scholarship based on hundreds of thousands of folios discarded in Cairo so many years ago.
The discovery of the Cairo Genizah, and its removal to western libraries, has revolutionized Jewish studies for over 100 years. From Schechter's identification of the original Ben Sira, to the discovery of thousands of previously unknown liturgical poems, to the unearthing of new textual variants in traditional liturgical and legal writings, to a greater understanding of Rabbanite-Karaite relations, to the reconstructing of "a Mediterranean society" accomplished by the Genizah master, S.D. Goitein, Genizah research has been instrumental in revising our knowledge and appreciation of many disparate aspects of the Jewish experience.
Stefan C. Reif has shown himself to be a man of many talents. He is a scholar in his own right, concentrating mostly on Jewish liturgy; his list of publications runs 21 pages (xxiii-xliii). Not only did he act as librarian for the Genizah collection, he was also its foremost public relations agent, spreading the word of its contents through popular writings, public lectures, and the Genizah Research Unit's newsletter. He was able to accomplish many of his tasks because of his ability to impress upon donors the importance of supporting scholarship. And as is evident in the book, and as is well known to his admirers, Stefan C. Reif is a consummate gentleman.
Although the articles in the Reif Festschrift are organized alphabetically, it will be useful to discuss them thematically, thus providing an opportunity of seeing the variety of facets of the world of the Genizah.
History and Contents of the Genizah
Although the name most closely associated with the discovery of the Genizah is that of Solomon Schechter, he was not the first person to have contact with the material which was deposited therein. Rebecca J.W. Jefferson describes the activities of one of the early Genizah adventurers, Count Riamo d'Hulst, who acquired Genizah material for the Bodleian Librarian at Oxford before Schechter arrived in Cairo, but that library, and its Judaica librarian Adolf Neubauer, did not sufficiently appreciate the contents of these documents and d'Hulst's efforts. This lack of recognition caused the Bodleian to lose the race to bring the Genizah to Europe, which is why the Genizah Research Unit is in Cambridge.
Haggai Ben-Shammai reminds the reader that there was more than one Cairo Genizah, not only in the Ben Ezra Synagogue which was the source of the Schechter materials. The Jewish cemetery and the Karaite synagogue also were repositories of much valuable "Genizah" material. Miriam Frenkel argues that Genizah documents are not just of historical or legal value, but they are also literary artifacts in and of themselves, thereby offering a corrective to the usual strict dichotomy between documents and literature in the Genizah. Judith Olszowy-Schlanger studies a palimpsest which is composed of an eleventh-century copy of a book of legal formularies from Lucena, Spain, superimposed on selections from the Book of Kings. Most Hebrew palimpsests from the Genizah are written on top of originals in other languages; this is a rare example of a Hebrew on Hebrew palimpsest, especially of note since the erased layer is a biblical text.
Of particular interest is the pioneering, interdisciplinary research of Zohar Amar, Azriel Gorski and Izhar Neumann who compared contemporary literary sources discussing the paper manufacturing industry with a stereomicroscopic analysis of the paper used in documents written in the Land of Israel in the eleventh century. They were able to determine the exact physical makeup of 21 different paper fragments, demonstrating the variety of manufacturing techniques. For instance, one fragment included rabbit hair, an ingredient mentioned in both rabbinic and Muslim sources. The combination of history and natural science offers new directions for future Genizah research.
Legal Issues
Mark Cohen discusses Maimonides' rulings concerning power of attorney and demonstrates that the flexibility in Maimonides' legal decisions is based upon the realities of business relationship as found in the Genizah material. Although he objects to the solutions of his predecessors to the problems presented by the employment of agents, Maimonides ultimately allows power of attorney, partially because it was used so widely in international trade. Phillip I. Ackerman- Lieberman publishes two versions of a bill of sale of a slave girl (Jewish involvement in slave owning and trading is an interesting subject in and of itself) in the early thirteenth century, which emanated from the court of Abraham Maimonides. He explains the contradictions between the documents by showing that each version served a different purpose, since one was for the agent of the seller and the other one for the buyer.
Economic Matters
Avihai Shivtiel analyzes 104 orders of payment, most of them signed by the twelfth-century Abu Zikri Kohen, which follow different formulae depending upon which product was involved. These are apparently the first recorded equivalents of modern bank checks. Abraham David uses Genizah documents to establish the place of Cairo in international trade in the sixteenth century, a comparatively late period for Genizah material. Most of the trade was with Venice and consisted of agricultural products, textiles, food and other goods.
Liturgy and Popular Religion Uri Ehrlich provides an example of how Genizah texts can be used to establish correct liturgy texts by comparing different versions of the twelfth-century prayer book of Solomon ben Nathan, and Joseph Yahalom compares holiday prayer books for the Land of Israel in terms of both paleography and liturgical, mostly poetical, content. For his part, Gideon Bohak looks at popular religious expressions by discussing a project which will provide a comprehensive catalogue of Cambridge texts of magic, astrology, divination and alchemy, abbreviated, ironically (?), MADA, the Hebrew word for science. This material had often been ignored because of prejudices of previous scholars, and much work remains to be done despite the catalogues and hand lists that have been compiled until now.
Linguistics, Language and Grammar
Since the Genizah material covers so many centuries, linguistic changes over time are a fruitful subject of research. Geoffrey Khan discusses various systems of vocalization of Judaeo-Arabic manuscripts from both the medieval and early modern period, demonstrating that one can use Genizah documents to learn about pronunciation and the language of the people behind the documents, as well as to differentiate between different strata of society. Esther-Miriam Wagner selects letters which were written between the eleventh and thirteenth century and argues that changes in formulaic openings reflect a weakening of the bourgeoisie over that period.
The late Friedrich Niessen analyzes the grammatical theories in an early, anonymous Karaite commentary on Hosea, demonstrating that these theories are closer to those of Joseph Ibn Nuh in mid-tenth century than to those of Abu-l Faraj Harun of the eleventh century, a fact which helps date the commentary. Michael Rand, in the longest article of the book, analyses the compositional techniques in the poetical prayers for dew and rain by the liturgical poet Eleazar berabbi Qillir, offering this study as an example of how the Genizah has revolutionized our knowledge of Hebrew liturgical poetry.
Although most of the Genizah material is written in Hebrew or Judaeo- Arabic, not all of it is. Shaul Shaked provides an overview of the few Judaeo-Persian fragments found there, some of which are bilingual with Arabic or Judaeo-Arabic. He suggests that some merchants used Persian as a code in order to keep certain things secret. This study demonstrates the mobility and multicultural nature of Genizah society.
The Genizah World
Mordecai A. Friedman discusses one of the more famous Genizah documents, an autograph letter by Judah ben Samuel Halevi which contains the first reference to his theological masterpiece, The Book of Kuzari. Friedman offers new readings of this letter, based upon a high-quality digital photograph, and argues for Halevi's relative tolerance of Karaites and his hope to reconcile them with Rabbanite Judaism by peaceful means.
Marina Rustow calls for a more nuanced view of Jewish community leadership based on Genizah documents which show that rabbinic leadership was not fully autonomous. She suggests looking at the status of courtiers, Karaites, and merchants for a truer picture of how Genizah society operated in actuality rather than merely in theory.
The volume concludes with a colorful, personal memoir by Reif based on his talk at the conference held in his honor, "albeit in a slightly expurgated form so as not to invite the interest of members of the legal profession" (xiv); and 11 plates, nine of them manuscripts which are discussed in the articles, and two photographs of Stefan C. Reif and his late wife, Shulamit, a fellow employee of the Genizah Research Unit and frequent collaborator, at the beginning of their careers and after thirty years of devoted service to the Cambridge University Genizah collection.