The Man Who Opened the Cairo Genizah to the World

From the 9th century through the 19th, the Jews of Fustat, a suburb of Cairo, left discarded manuscripts in the genizah (repository) of the Ben Ezra synagogue, but it was not until the end of the 19th century that the rabbi and scholar Solomon Schechter realized what a boon this collection could be for the study of Jewish history, and set about examining it systematically. Playing a key role in making this collection available to scholars was Stefan Reif, who has recently written a memoir. Yakir Feldman writes:

Highly readable and richly laced with understated . . . British humor, [the memoir] is factual, yet a good story; funny, yet serious; personal, yet universal. . . . Powered by a seemingly near-photographic memory and buttressed by disciplined research and a natural raconteur’s inerrant sixth sense of what is relevant and interesting, Stefan Reif brings post-World War II Edinburgh to life, conveying in indelible verbal images that are unstintingly honest what conditions were like in that bygone era for a bright child of struggling Jewish immigrant parents.

In an interview, Reif tells Feldman:

I was twenty-nine years old when Cambridge appointed me to look after this collection. There were 200,000 fragments, most of them deteriorating, lying in crates—unavailable, unexamined, unconserved. The prevalent idea in the Cambridge University Library was that this was not at all a priority and was in any case too enormous a job for one career, one scholar, one lifetime. I disagreed.

Just as the Dead Sea Scrolls completely changed our understanding of the Second Temple Period, the Cairo Genizah completely changed our understanding of the early medieval period, the 10th century to the 13th century in the Mediterranean as a whole—from France to India. It contains priceless treasures—for example, 120 writings in Maimonides’ own handwriting.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: British Jewry, Cairo Geniza, Scotland

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society