Review of Hoffman & Cole, "Sacred Trash"

HOFFMAN AND COLE, SACRED TRASH, is reviewed in Haaretz by Avi Steinberg. Excerpt:

As they approach the end of their book, the authors admit that they haven’t even begun to begin. They haven’t, they write, adequately dealt with Biblical literature. “Another Geniza book, or three,” they admit, “could be written around what we’ve left out.” This confession turns out to be a lesson: that the problem of what has been left out of “Sacred Trash” is not truly a problem but rather the unavoidable consequence of dipping into the Geniza’s seemingly fathomless ocean of possibilities. Apparently the deeper one swims in this ocean, the sharper this lesson becomes. Of “A Mediterranean Society,” the multi-volume, several-thousand-page scholarly masterpiece that emerged over decades from Geniza sources, S.D. Goitein, its author, said it was “only a sketch.”

There is a tendency among the obsessed to speak in occult terms about the Geniza, about specters and miracles. “Suddenly,” wrote scholar Ezra Fleischer, “with the Geniza’s discovery, [tens of thousands of recovered lost poems were] released like spirits or ghosts through the square opening of that sealed room at the end of the women’s gallery of the Ben Ezra synagogue.” With the Cairo Geniza, it is difficult to avoid the uncanny, disorienting experience of encountering lost memory − it is a testament to Cole and Hoffman that they have fleshed out these ghosts, and patiently constructed a vivid, human saga every bit extraordinary as a miracle.

Earlier reviews noted here and links. And another recent post on the Cairo Geniza is here.