I was sent a stunning book last week by the National Library of Israel. Entitled 101 Treasures and produced to celebrate the opening of the Library’s new building, the book is a remarkable production, both for its content and its presentation. Imposing, eye-catching and studded with glossy, full page photographs of 101 items in the Library’s collection, it is the sort of book that you might casually open because it looks interesting and find yourself still browsing half an hour later.
Jewish culture is book-oriented; Jews themselves are sometimes described as the People of the Book. The Book in that phrase is the Bible but our association with the written word runs much deeper than that. I remember as a young child one of my school teachers saying how much she enjoyed going into the homes of her Jewish pupils because they contained many books. I don’t have any statistics to bear this out but it feels as if a disproportionate number of Jews are writers: authors, scriptwriters, content creators etc.
Yet despite the allure of books and of writing, despite the remarkable number of religious, philosophical and legal texts that Jewish thinkers have produced, there were no Jewish libraries in times gone by, other than a few collections owned by a very small number of enthusiasts. There was no such thing as a Jewish scriptorium where rows of monks copied out manuscripts; there were no rooms stacked with shelves full of Jewish books to match those of a great monastery or a bibliophile monarch. Jewish life was too insecure. Even if you could afford them there was little point in collecting books or manuscripts; you were too worried that you might be expelled from your home at a moment’s notice. And to top it all, Christian Europe made a habit of burning Jewish books. The torrent of book burnings that began in earnest in Paris in 1240, with the immolation of 24 cartloads of the Talmud, was still deluging 700 years later in Nazi Germany.
It wasn’t just the Talmud that was burnt in Paris, the officials who ransacked Jewish homes for their manuscripts were not literate enough to distinguish one Hebrew text from another. But the consequence of the burnings was that only one complete manuscript of the Talmud has survived from the Middle Ages. Jews played their part in the destruction of books too, possibly even emboldening those responsible for the Paris burnings. When the Dominicans burned Maimonides’s books in 1232 it was at the instigation of Jews who opposed the great philosopher’s works.
Jews came late to the library party but they came eventually. Elia Levita, a 16th century Yiddish novelist and Hebrew language grammarian who lived with and taught Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo in Rome, had an extensive collection of Hebrew manuscripts. The Cardinal had an even larger Hebrew library. Both men lost the bulk of their collections when the Cardinal’s palace and library were set on fire by the army of the Holy Roman Empire in 1527.
One of the earliest major collectors of Jewish books was David Oppenheim. Reputed to have owned 7,000 books and 1,000 manuscripts, he was the chief rabbi of Prague and the nephew of Samuel Oppenheimer about whom I wrote a few weeks ago. He travelled through Europe buying books at fairs and from other collectors. He kept his library at the home of his father-in-law in Hanover because he feared for its safety in Prague. His collection is now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Like the libraries of all other collectors, David Oppenheim’s was a private collection. He may have occasionally lent a text to a trusted scholar but the public had no access to his books. The first Jewish public library in Europe opened in Vilna, now Vilnius, in Lithuania in 1902. Ten years earlier a small Public Library had opened in Jerusalem. It merged with the library of the Hebrew University in 1925 to become the Jewish National and University Library. Now known as the National Library of Israel, it its prestigious collections include Gershom Scholem’s 25,000 volumes of kabbalistic literature. A few years ago it acquired from the Valmadonna Trust the 10,000 volume collection of rare books and prints that the bibliophile Jack Lunzer assembled over his lifetime. It also recently bought a more modest but hugely significant trove of 300 handwritten, 11th to 13th century documents, part of a larger collection that was discovered in caves in Afghanistan about 20 years ago.
Extracts from two of the Afghanistan documents are reproduced, in full glossy colour, in 101 Treasures. One is a legal document, written in Persian script and dating from the year 1011. Known as an iqrar and binding under Islamic law, it records the debt of seven silver coins owed to a Jewish merchant, Abu Nasr ben Daniyal. The debtors state that they are under a binding obligation. “We cannot revoke this as long as we do not deliver to him these seven shiyani. This document serves as evidence for him.”
101 Treasures contains a vast and varied selection of images, all stunningly reproduced. There are mediaeval maps of the world, of the Holy Land and of Jerusalem, family documents, records from community archives, illustrated manuscripts, an image from an illustrated fairy tale written and drawn by the German novelist Herman Hesse, and a miniature Qur’an, too small to be read but used as a talisman. Four pages are devoted to theological and alchemical manuscripts written by Isaac Newton, whose interests were far wider than the scientific theories for which he is best known. In one illustration, written in Latin and Hebrew, he explains and defines biblical and Talmudic phrases.
There is a page from Maimonides’ code of Jewish law, Mishneh Torah. It is illustrated with the figure of a man holding a Torah scroll. The man’s face is fully visible and, like other similar medieval and ancient illustrations, refutes the assumption that Jews did not make representations of the human figure.
One of the more recent documents in the book is a ledger containing the records of four rabbis who were sent from Jerusalem to America to raise funds for the impoverished communities of the Holy Land. For centuries people had been sending money to the small Jewish communities in Palestine, both for reasons of charity and out of a belief that those who lived a life of piety in the Holy Land were responsible for the spiritual elevation of the entire Jewish nation. It goes without saying that the little money they received from overseas was never enough, and never arrived sufficiently quickly. So, rather than just waiting, the rabbis in Jerusalem sent emissaries to Jewish communities around the world, to raise additional funds.
One of the first collectors sent from the Holy Land to the New World was the 28 year old Isaac Carigal. He arrived in Curaçao in 1761 and travelled through the West Indies to the North American mainland, seeking donations from both Jews and Christians. He sent money back to the Holy Land, though it is not known how much, and he paid his way across the continent from the funds he raised. When he was in Jamaica he sent £1,000 to his wife, who he had left in Hebron. It was an astonishingly large sum in those days, particularly on the part of someone who was supposed to be collecting for charity.
Carigal wasn’t the only collector to treat the funds he raised as his own personal endowment. He at least was a registered collector, he had been sent by the communities in Palestine, but there were other alleged collectors who were simply acting on their own initiative and probably pocketing far more than Isaac Carigal. When the Jewish leaders in Jerusalem realised that they were only seeing a fraction of the money raised in their name, they decided to formalise the system of fundraising. They required the emissaries who they sent out to keep a ledger recording all the sums they had raised.
The four rabbis whose activities are recorded in the ledger displayed in 101 Treasures were sent between 1848 and 1869. The extent of the poverty in Palestine was well known. An American visitor to the country had written a letter describing the appalling conditions in Jerusalem. He had said that there was no work to be had, that disease was rife, there was no health care and the town was full of old people who had no means of support, who had come to the Holy Land simply to end their days. He added that, surprisingly, the cost of living in Jerusalem was as high as in New York.
One of the four fundraising rabbis was Nathan Nata Notkin. He travelled to America twice, in 1867 and again in 1876. He was given a fundraising ledger to complete; its title page containing the signatures of the community leaders who sent him is reproduced in 101 Treasures. Despite being given a ledger his record-keeping is far from comprehensive and the sums he raised were far short of the $1,000 Isaac Carigal sent home. One page in the ledger certifies that the Congregation of the Children of Israel in Augusta, Georgia sent $74.35, with a further $6.45 being collected shortly afterwards. In Macon the Congregation Bet Israel raised $13.25. Nashville, Tennessee donated $45.10.
The problem was not simply that people did not have much money to give, or that they did not care. Rather, notwithstanding the poverty in Jerusalem, there was a considerable reluctance by the leaders of American Jewry to encourage and support Notkin and his fellow collectors. Isaac Leeser, one of the most prominent American Jewish leaders, complained that “the Jewish inhabitants of the Holy City are a degraded set of idle paupers. The funds sent from Europe are much abused by the Rabbis while the poorer people are content to live on a miserable dole rather than labour for their bread.”
Not only did Leeser and his colleagues believe the inhabitants of Jerusalem were not as deserving as they made out; the whole fundraising process was flawed. The collectors paid for their travel and living expenses from the funds they raised, and they took a commission as well. It meant that the actual sums remitted to Jerusalem were far less than even the small amounts that had been collected.
As far as the poor of Jerusalem were concerned the bulk of their financial support came from a few wealthy donors, men like Moses Montefiore and the Dutch philanthropist Hirsch Lehren, rather than from travelling envoys. Despite its historic interest the work of people like Rabbi Notkin probably made little difference to their lives.
The photographs in 101 Treasures may be the treasures of just one of the world’s many libraries, but Jews, who have lived in nearly every country of the world over the past 2,000 years have a unique, global perspective. More than just a snapshot of Jewish history, 101 Treasures offers a panorama of the astonishing diversity of human endeavour and of the many different ways in which we live our lives.