The scholar who defied odds to unveil the treasures of the Cairo Genizah - Book Review

The best autobiographies are portals that enable us to 1) enter worlds and places from the past that no longer exist and 2) explore the minds, thoughts and emotions of extraordinary people who have struggled, triumphed and achieved significant accomplishments. And if the author relating the firsthand experiences just happens also to be a talented and witty storyteller, so much the better.

Bouncing Back – and Forward is such a book. Highly readable and richly laced with understated read-between-the-lines British humor, it is factual, yet a good story; funny, yet serious; personal, yet universal – a luminous, inspiring and rewarding read.

Powered by a seemingly near-photographic memory (I’m envious; I feel like I know more about the author’s life and times now than I know about my own) 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.

After inviting and enabling us to relive Reif’s formative period with him (a portrait of the scholar as a young man), this compelling memoir takes us on a journey through his remarkable career to the present day. We accompany a precocious Scottish lad through his failures and successes as he overcomes adversity and daunting obstacles to become a world-renowned Cambridge scholar; an expert on the Cairo Genizah; a professor, prolific author and sought-after speaker, as well as patriarch of an accomplished and beloved family in Israel.

The Magazine was honored to be invited to a sit-down conversation recently with the prolific author in the garden of his Beit Shemesh home.

The hundreds of articles and 20-odd books I have penned are professional works for scholars. A few years ago my wife Shulie said, “Can you for once write something that’s readable?” So I hope I now have.

In many ways I had a difficult childhood. My father was away for extended periods; he had been in the Polish and British military for 15 years. For my first three years I hardly saw him, and when I did see him, our encounters tended to be somewhat traumatic.

One of my ways of dealing with it was to be reflective. “Why did he scream and shout at me and smack me, and how can I deal with this problem? How can I be a good boy, a successful boy?” Each event demanded reflection, and if you reflect, you remember, so it stuck in my mind.

Writing about it in the opening chapters was cathartic. I had to recover the persona of the three-and-a-half-year-old boy as he dealt with his problems.

At first I did it for my children and grandchildren, for my colleagues, for myself. It would be terrible if my great-grandchildren had to ask “Who is this Stefan Reif who was your grandfather?” and the only answer they could get was “I don’t really know much about where he came from or what his background was.”

And then, as I finished the first chapter or two, I started to think: This is actually something that will be of interest and value in a broader world – not just in Jewish circles. At that point I realized that I must continue the project and achieve a result that would be interesting for everybody and anybody.

You’re right. 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’s own handwriting.

But I have already published copious scholarly works on the Genizah materials. What I wanted to bring out this time was an amazing personal story behind the Genizah.

I was 29 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. I gave the director a long list of what was essential to be done with this collection, but was informed that all this was admirable but there was no university budget for it.

In the book I recount how, motivated by my conviction that scholarship is about bringing information to those who are thirsty for it, I did what I had been told was undoable. Raising money through donors enabled me to assemble a team of researchers in specific areas, and utilizing new technologies as they became available through the years, we examined, categorized, preserved and shared the materials.

Today you can go online and find all the fragments – plus rich interpretation and commentary – and scholars around the globe routinely reference them in their work.

As I got older, I noticed a change in my writing. Some 52 years ago (I published my first article in 1969), I was writing about language, about history, about manuscripts – very well researched and documented. I wasn’t writing about people.

In the past 10 years I find I’m increasingly interested in things like: Who are they, these researchers? Why are they interested in this? What were these people’s motivations? How did they come to scholarship? Where did they come from? That intrigued me and made me think I should also be part of this. I wanted to reveal what motivated me. How did I come to undertake this project?

So my focus shifted to people as well as manuscripts. Manuscripts are important and they have a life of their own, but there are people behind the manuscripts. Somebody wrote this manuscript. Why did they write it?

Schopenhauer said, “The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party when the masks are dropped.” This is what I loved about writing this memoir: I was myself. I wasn’t writing footnotes or bibliographies. I wasn’t proving anything academic. When I first had the idea of writing it three or four years ago, I decided my job was to tell it as I saw it. So unlike my previous works, it is impressionistic rather than a formal history.

JUST AS a genizah fragment is a window to the past – how people lived and thought – so in some ways each human being is a living genizah fragment, a repository of one unique aspect of the grand human experience.

Stefan Reif is an example par excellence.

When a talented and accomplished person not only lives an eventful and successful life but also manages to capture and share that experience in a well-written memoir, it enriches us all and is a cause for celebration.