Sacred Trash by Hoffman and Cole

For almost a thousand years, starting in the late 10th century, an entire Jewish community put all of its written detritus into what would come to be known as the Cairo Geniza.
Award-winning authors Peter Cole and Adina Hoffman trace the story of the 19th-century scholars who discovered and brought to light what Cynthia Ozick has called “the eighth wonder of the world.”
The authors of “Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza” (Schocken, 2011), will bring that story to Temple Israel in Westport on Sunday, Feb. 12.
“It was as if the entire society had been emptying its pockets out,” says Hoffman. “As a result, we found there everything, from poems to letters to marriage contracts… court depositions, Rabbinic responsa, children’s primers, doctors’ prescriptions, everything that the society wrote down. The Cairo Geniza is arguably the greatest discovery of Jewish manuscripts ever made.”
The story begins with “two unlikely heroines,” says Hoffman, Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, identical twin sisters and Presbyterian Scotswomen who had traveled to Egypt.

Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole

“On one May day in 1896, Agnes was out for a walk and she bumped into this incredibly charismatic, remarkably learned Jewish figure, Solomon Schechter, a Romanian-born Talmud scholar who was teaching at Cambridge,” says Cole. “She told him about one of the manuscripts they’d brought back that they couldn’t identify and asked him to have a look. Within hours, he knew that he had a vital link in the chain of Jewish transmission that went all the way back to the days when the Second Temple was still standing. It was a page from the long-lost apocryphal Hebrew book of Ben Sira or Ecclesiasticus.”
“Sacred Trash” follows Schechter’s journey from that first fragment to the Cairo Geniza. It tells the story of the scholars who developed a lifelong obsession with the Geniza and made the major discoveries associated with the material.
“We also look at what it was about these scholars that enabled them to see treasure where other people had just seen garbage,” says Cole.”
Writer Harold Bloom calls “Sacred Trash” a “small masterpiece.”
Adina Hoffman is the author of “House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood” and “My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century,” which was named a best book of 2009 by the Barnes & Noble Review.
Peter Cole’s most recent book of poems is “Things on Which I’ve Stumbled.” His many volumes of award-winning translations include The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950 – 1492. He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2007.
Hoffman and Cole live, together, in Jerusalem and New Haven.

“Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza:” Sunday, Feb. 12, 10 a.m., Temple Israel, 14 Coleytown Road, Westport | Info: (203) 227-1293