I’ve spent the last couple of years on and off trying to find a set of photographs of Karaite manuscripts that my advisor was involved in shooting in Cairo in the mid-seventies on behalf of a Bay Area collector, Seymour Fromer. Fromer’s papers are now mostly in the Bancroft Library at UC-Berkeley. There’s a lot of record of his travels to Egypt and to India to document Jewish books and collect Judaica for his museum in Berkeley, the Judah Magnes Collection. I wasn’t able to find the manuscript photos. (The one above isn’t from that set.) They may still be in one set of personal papers that hasn’t been processed for scholarly access yet (Ze’ev Brinner’s papers), but it appears that even in the mid-seventies they didn’t make it to the JNUL, which helped to fund the expedition to Cairo.
This is the point at which I got stuck on the Lone Medievalist Challenge. I’m actually writing this on August 27, but will backdate it so that it comes in the correct place in the order of my blog posts. The trouble that I was running into was in that I don’t know that “people of color” is a suitable term to use in the context of medieval Spain; and my explanations were falling short and the images I was choosing to shoehorn into the theme weren’t really doing what I needed them to do in able to facilitate a a post appropriately thoughtful for the subject. So: I’m not in any way saying, as some medievalists do and as my colleagues who work on the subject of race and race-making in the Middle Ages rightly decry, that race wasn’t an applicable category in the medieval period. Rather, what I’m saying is that “people of color” as a term seems to me so bounded by modern, western notions of race that to try to identify a “person of color” in medieval Spain requires, itself, a lot of racial categorization that I don’t think is appropriate for the scholar to take on.
With that said, I’m going to combine my “people of color” post with my “library/collection” post because the former allows me to talk about the latter in the context of modern medievalism.
These are some images from the Beit-Bialik house-museum archive, where I spent several weeks last summer looking at Hayim Nahman Bialik’s manuscript draft of his Hebrew translation of Don Quixote and his notes from the time when he was editing the poetic diwan of Solomon ibn Gabirol. But in spite of Bialik’s interest in both the Jews of Spain and utilizing Spanish literature as a way of creating a world literature in Hebrew, he was largely contemptuous of actual Sephardim and Mizrahi Jews. There are two versions of a statement attributed to him, one saying that he hated Sephardim because they reminded him of Arabs and the other asking how he could hate Arabs when they were so like Sephardim; neither version reflects an attitude friendly toward people of color within the Jewish world or the Levant. The archivist of Beit-Bialik sees himself as an absolute defender of Bialik’s reputation; but reading work of scholars like Lital Levi and Sami Chetrit suggests that such a full-throated defense is not warranted.
Eventually, I would like to write something about this very short essay by Jorge Luis Borges. I had tried to work an excursus on it into a review essay I’m writing, but it just wasn’t working and read very forced. It’s now sitting in a file called “cut bits from review essay.docx.” (I will just note that with Borges being the writer he is, I did actually track down his reference to Ramos Mejía, and it exists as it is reflected in this essay.) So for now, I’m just sharing the text, because it’s one of those things I think everyone should read. This is allegedly an image of the original manuscript copy, currently for sale in a Buenos Aires bookshop (anyone have a spare $24k they don’t know what to do with?); I’m not enough of a Borgista to know if this is really his hand or not. In any case, it’s very clear. Read on.
About two-thirds of the way through my lecture class meeting on Wednesday, one of the students shouted out, loudly enough for the whole room to hear: “THIS IS JUST LIKE LITERATURE DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS!” Not all of the students were quite that enthusiastic about the day’s activity, but most of them got into it and I think that the activity that I will be calling Literature Dungeons and Dragons from here on out (it is medieval, after all), was a success.
I had the great good fortune last week to be able to sit with some of the treasures from the Valmadonna Trust library before they were sold off at Sotheby’s last week. There was no crowd there on a Friday afternoon, and I’ve gotten to know one of their Judaic people, who seems very happy to let scholars look at the books that are being sold before they potentially disappear onto a collector’s mantle-piece on Park Avenue or into his vault in London.
I’m just chuffed to death with this picture and still a little bit bowled over by having had the chance to sit with a Bible that my guys or the guys in their extended intellectual circles might have themselves read.
I’ve been looking back at some of the media coverage when it was first announced several years ago that the collection was going to be broken up and sold, as a last resort, after no buyer could be found for the entire collection. The Times’ Edward Rothstein made note of some of the quotations that were written on the walls of the exhibition space then, including: “Make books your companions. Let your bookshelves be your gardens,” which Rothstein identifies as “the words of a 12th-century Spanish Jewish scholar, Judah Ibn Tibbon, translated on one gallery wall.”
The epigram is taken from a lengthy letter written by Judah ibn Tibbon to his son, which survives in a single manuscript copy in Oxford:
Bodleian Mich. MS 50.3 f. 116 v
That is a correct attribution as far as it goes, but there is much more to that quotation, how it ended up at the tip of Judah ibn Tibbon’s pen, and what he omitted in the process of transposing it from his native Spain to the France where he would spend most of his life in exile.
