Download decorated) page facilitated my own Hebrew studies. A thousand

decorated) page facilitated my own Hebrew studies.
A thousand years ago, I thought, a Jewish child in
Cairo sat down at a table to begin learning Hebrew
vowels—“Ah, ah, eh, ay, ee.” A few dozen years ago,
another Jewish child (yours truly) sat at a table in suburban Chicago and began learning Hebrew in much
the same way. Eight years ago, yet another child—
my son Jacob—sat at his table and forged one more
link in the ancient chain of study. Could the child in
Cairo ever have imagined that, a millennium later, a
father and son would be looking at his schoolbook in
a distant northern land?
Dr. Outhwaite then showed us a torn section of
another primer filled with children’s writing exercises. “Look,” he said, “this kid did a sloppy job with his
letters, and then began to doodle.”
Jacob and I looked at each other and laughed. In
elementary school, Jacob was notorious for zipping
through his work so that he could use the extra time
for reading. The kid who wrote these letters during the
Middle Ages whizzed through his writing exercises to
get to the fun stuff, just as Jacob had.
Some things never change.
Dr. Outhwaite placed an archival box on his conference table. “Here’s one of the other documents you
requested,” he said.
It was Ben Sirah—the very same page that Solomon Schechter had seen at Agnes Lewis’ home in 1896!
And next to it appeared the note that Schechter had
written to Lewis later that day confirming the significance of the find—which would eventually bring the
Cairo Genizah to the attention of the Western world.
What a moment, I thought. I’m holding a 114-yearold note, handwritten by Solomon Schechter in the
very institution where we now sit, which references
reform judaism
Treasure_w10_Design2_be1.indd 40
*****
the Cambridge University Library is still in the
process of conserving Genizah documents. What was
once a matter of sliding old documents into plastic sleeves
has become a painstakingly elaborate and high-tech process, allowing for the conservation of only about four
documents a day.
Lucy Cheng, one of the project’s conservators, explained
that her work consists of three basic steps: cleaning the documents, flattening them, and repairing them. The cleaning process poses risks. Paper tends to be highly absorbent, soaking up mud and other gunk which becomes
irreversibly mixed with the ink of the text. Cheng gently
employs scrapers and brushes to remove whatever dirt she
can. If she decides that removing the mud might result in
deleting the text, she leaves the mud undisturbed. Conservators hope that future technologies will allow it to be
removed while keeping the ink in place.
Many Genizah documents are crumbling or torn. To
patch them, conservators use “Japanese paper,” a strong,
lightweight, translucent film with adhesive on one side
and wheat paste on the other. Cheng traces the shape she
40
Photos by Jacob Glickman
The stunning
interior of
the Ben Ezra
Synagogue,
Cairo.
a 10th-century manuscript sitting right next to it on the table,
which is itself a transcription of a
text originally written 1,200 years
before that!
One by one, the remaining boxes and albums came to the table,
each bearing treasures: an early copy of one of the Dead Sea
Scrolls; the world’s oldest known
piece of Jewish sheet music (Mi al
Har Chorev, a eulogy for Moses
written by a former Catholic priest
from Italy who converted to Judaism during the Crusades); the last
letter Maimonides received from
his younger brother, David, who
died in a shipwreck shortly after
sending it. “Be steadfast,” David
had written, “for God will [soon]
restore your losses and bring me
back to you.” There are large holes
in the letter, I wondered. Were they from age, or from the
tears of a grieving brother?
Next we visited the large Manuscript Storage Room,
which houses some of the greatest literary treasures in
the world. Near the main Genizah section is the Darwin
aisle—the shelves storing Darwin’s papers, including
the original diaries from his voyage on the Beagle. Isaac
Newton’s papers are just a few rows away. The Genizah
documents are mostly housed in two 60-foot aisles packed
floor to ceiling with shelves of boxes and albums—an
agglomeration of literary material so massive and so rich
that it holds many secrets of our past yet to be revealed.
winter 2010
9/29/10 5:52 AM