Peter Cole (4) (1957–)

Fascinating, but I'm overwhelmed with facts; I won't remember them all: There are the names of all the people connected with the Cairo Geniza and what they found from there and how it changed, created, added to many topics, including biblical commentary, Spanish poetry, daily life, and our knowledge of many important scholars, poets, writers, some not known before. I found out that Solomon Schechter met Flinders Petrie, "the leading English Egyptologist of the day [p.81]," and they sailed back from Egypt to England together and nearly drowned on the same ship. They shared "Petrie's belief in the archeological importance of 'unconsidered trifles' for the reconstruction of history." [p. 81]… (meer)

Interesting that both this book and Sacred Treasure - The Cairo Genizah: The Amazing Discoveries of Forgotten Jewish History in an Egyptian Synagogue Attic were published almost simultaneously in 2011, so I decided to read them both back to back. Both detail [and I do mean detail] the history of the discovery of the Cairo Geniza, a repository for old Jewish manuscripts. But this one reads like a scholarly tome, more a history of the scholars who worked on the geniza manuscripts than on the geniza itself.

I was particularly disappointed that Friedburg Geniza project for digitalizing all the known fragments, which will surely revolutionize the study of these manuscripts, was barely mentioned in the .afterword. Even worse, one would never know from this book that the majority of geniza texts are spells, incantations, and instructions for performing these from myriads of ancient magic manuals.

If you want to read one book on the Cairo Geniza, read Mark Glickman's, not this one… (meer)

A geniza(h) is a kind of storeroom found in a Jewish synagogue or cemetery, used to store old Hebrew religious texts, as it was forbidden to throw away or destroy any document which contained the name of God. Over time, genizot also came to contain many writings of a secular nature in languages like Yiddish or Ladino, because even personal letters and legal contracts could begin with a divine invocation. The Cairo Geniza is one of the largest medieval genizot, with documents and document fragments numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

The title of this book is a little misleading—Sacred Trash is really more a collection of linked biographies about key scholars, such as Solomon Schechter and S.D. Goitein, who've worked on the Cairo Geniza since its "discovery" in the late 19th century. To that extent, it may be a little dense for someone who doesn't have much background in the area; certainly, while I've read some about this Geniza before, and about the Jewish community of Fustat, there were parts that went over my head. Hoffman and Cole do seem to assume a Jewish readership, or at least a readership which has done more focused reading in the area than I have. Still, I think if you do have an interest in the area, or even just in the role of serendipity, chance, and hard work in scholarly endeavours, Sacred Trash makes for a very interesting read.… (meer)