Identifying Scholarship

THEJEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW, XCII,Nos. 1-2 (July-October, 2001) 145-153 Review Essay IDENTIFYINGSCHOLARSHIP ELEAZAR GUTWIRTH, Tel Aviv University HebrewManuscriptsat CambridgeUniversityLibrary:A Descriptionand Introduction,by S. C. Reif assistedby ShulamitReif andincorporatingearlier workby S. M. Schiller-Szinessy, H. M. J. Loewe andJ. Leveen andincludingpaleographicaladvice fromE. Engel withcooperationof theHebrew PalaeographyProject and of the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts at the Jewish National and University Libraryin Jerusalem.Cambridge :UniversityPress/Facultyof OrientalStudies, 1997. Pp. xx + 626; ill. Wouldit not be presumptuousof me if, in order to appear convincingly objective and down to earthI enumeratedfor you themainsections orprize pieces of a library?' Walter Benjamin's Angst is perfectly understandable:speaking about books and cataloguing has always been problematic. Such a problem comes to the fore with the recent publication of identificationsand/or descriptions of 979 Hebrew manuscripts,20 Samaritanones and 67 manuscripts in other languages relating to Hebraica and Judaica at one of the richestcollections in the world,the UniversityLibraryat Cambridge(ULC). The usual metaphors of "jewels" and "treasures,"or the argumentsover this or that description-among more than 1,000 items-are clearly out of place in this case. And yet, there certainly exists a metaphoric tradition. The founder of the Science of Judaism,Leopold Zunz, refersto himself in 1848 as being a melaqqet, someone who gathers the sheafs of (textual) wheat left behind for the poor by the great "land-owner"of scholarship, the cataloguerHeimann Joseph Michael. Around 1927, HerbertLoewe referredto his descriptionsof ULC manuscriptsas "half a loaf."Kohutwrote (ca. 1876) aboutthe publicationof manuscripts(the edition of the CArukh) as lehavi' sifri al mizbeah ha-dfus, combiningtraditionsof "manuscript gastronomy "with the image of publishedscholarshipas contribution/offering/ sacrifice/annihilation. Steinschneiderattributes(his pupil) Kayserling'sutter 1Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and tr. HarryZohn (New York, 1969), p. 59. 146 THE JEWISH QUARTERLYREVIEW failureto havingleft bibliography(BibliotecaEspaciola-Portugueza-Judaica, 1890) to the end and having startedwith literaryhistory (Sefardim:Romanische Poesie der Juden in Spanien, 1859), rather than the other way around.For Steinschneider,therewas no doubtaboutthe relationsbetween the history of ideas, the history of texts, the history of literaturesandcataloguing or listing. The catalogue engendered the history and the familial relationsmust not be reversed.2 In a lecture delivered to the HungarianAcademy of Sciences at its session of 23 April 1906, devoted to the Kaufmanncollection when its catalogue was published, Ignacz Goldziher attempted to construct a binary typology of collecting HebraicaandJudaicamanuscripts.Thereare, Goldziher said, two distinct types of collections: that of the specialist who wants an apparatusandthatgoverned by "amateurpoints of view,"with its emphasis on "curiosities."Nevertheless, this objectivist, anti-metaphoric pose cannot be maintained for long. The subjective, impressionistic discourse about a collection cannot be repressed.For him, some manuscripts are pearls while others are cimelia. One was mentioned because it was an hungaricum, others because they excited the interest of scholars from abroad.At the British Museum in 1935, J. Leveen distinguished between "literarycuriosity" and "intrinsic importance";between the nucleus and the later acquisition. S. Schechter had a similar interest in classifications. With affected simplicity he referredto it as sorting; but it was this sorting activity which was crystallized in his reinvention of himself as Geniza scholar in the most famous photographwe have of him. He developed a number of taxonomic strategies in orderto discuss Margoliouth'sHebrew manuscriptcatalogue. Ashkenazi versus Sephardiis one of the categories for attemptingthe impossible and yet unavoidabletask of imposing meaning on a mass of disparateand highly uneven book descriptions. Republished in his Studies in Judaism, it became a classic of Jewish Studies. In 1920, Louis Ginzberg did something similar in a lecture on halakha and Jewish thought. Rejecting the search for definitions such as "race,"he showed the centralityof halakhato Jewish thought(althoughwithoutcoining the termhalakhocentric)by "a plain example in arithmetic,"which was based on "looking at the classification of the Hebrew books in the British Museum."3 2L. Zunz, "Prefaceto OrHayyimby H. Michael (Berlin, 1848). Kohut's"Letter" is in Israel Davidson, "Leqet Mikhtavim,"in Studies in Jewish Bibliography and Related Subjects, in MemoryofAbrahamSolomonFreidus (New York, 1929), p. 20. Steinschneider, "Allgemeine Einleitung in die judische Literaturdes Mittelalters," JQRo.s. 16 (1904) 752-753. 3I. Goldziher's speech in Microcard Catalogue ... Kaufmann Collection, ed. R. Gergely, (Budapest, 1959). Leveen...