Archival Mystery Storytime

Come, sit by the fire

This, right here, is the earliest known musical notation of a Jewish song (and it’s a song that’s notated with trope, cantillation marks for liturgical recitation).

The story of how we got this, the mystery it caused, and the fascinating backstory of the likely author of it are all a pretty good story. So I thought I’d tell it! Thanks to the archivist known as Fred MacDowell for bringing this image to my attention.

Some of you might know this tale. Guessing most of you don’t.

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So.

There’s this thing in Judaism where we treat the Tetragrammaton—the holiest of the divine names—with a special kind of sanctity. There are special rules around not only pronouncing it (we don’t) but writing it: How to write it, what to do if you’re scribing it and make a mistake, etc. And, as such, there are also rules around how we handle paper or parchment on which the Most Holy Name is written if that paper or parchment is no longer useable or valid/kosher for use. The most respectful and honored way to handle them is to bury it—there’s a lot in the tradition about the ways in which a Torah is like a human being, and a human life is like the Torah. This is one of those resonances.

But definitely things should be preserved respectfully—the Talmud (Shabbat 115a) teaches that all sacred writings should be preserved in a place where they can’t be destroyed. The Hebrew word for “to hide” or “to put away” is G-N-Z, and a lot of synagogues have genizas, special storage areas for sacred texts—ostensibly to keep prior to burial, but also, sometimes, just, like, they never get around to the burial part. A lot of genizas keep (or, if historical, have kept) not only papers with the Tetragrammaton and other sacred texts, and, more broadly, Hebrew-language writings on religious topics, as well as other kinds of contracts in the Jewish community, writings in Judeo-Persion or Yiddish or Judeo-Arabic or the like, that sort of thing.

So with this background you can understand that when Jewish scholars became aware, in the late 19th c., of a collection of some 400,000 Jewish manuscript fragments and Fatimid administrative documents that were kept in the geniza of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat or Old Cairo, Egypt, dating from the 6th to the 19th c.—well, it was a BFD.

Maybe the various contents of the Cairo Genizah deserve their own post—how it illuminated the social and economic history of 950 and 1250 across the Mediterranean. Its Qumran (aka “Dead Sea Scrolls”)-related stuff. New information on relationship of Jews to Khazaria. Original Maimonides letters, responsa, drafts. I could go on and on. ANYWAY.

One of the things they found in the Geniza was this musical notation (above) which, when set to music, sounds like this:

1×

0:00

-3:31

That’s right. Gregorian chant. Set to Hebrew liturgy. Preserved in a North African Jewish synagogue.

(The words are, “Blessed is the man that trusts in God, and whose trust God is.” (Jeremiah 17:7) And yes, this one is “man,” explicitly.)

There were also a couple of other examples (that I’ll link below, can’t find embeddable versions and don’t want to spoiler, here) of the same thing—Hebrew words, Gregorian chant. Found in a genizah in Cairo. WTF, scholars asked themselves. Who are the Jews setting their liturgy to.. church music?

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Music scholar Neil Levin, with the support of some Benedictine experts on Gregorian chant, said that the music was of the southern Italian (“Lombardic”) type, but the manuscript handwriting, paper, and some elements of the notation were clearly Middle Eastern/Egyptian. The scribed vellum didn’t come in from somewhere else; it was, as they say, a local job.

Scholars proceeded to break their head on this mystery for some time, until suddenly, in 1964, two scholars who had been working independently of each other (Alexander Scheiber and Norman Golb) both confirmed that the handwriting and script of the musical manuscripts were the same of that as…. (drumroll, please):

Ovadiah the ger.

(Ger means convert/Jew by choice).

For, Ovadiah’s whole autobiography was found in the geniza as well. And here’s what we know:

He was born under a different name around 1075 CE in Oppido, in southern Italy, to a Norman-Italian family. His father was a Norman knight who took part in the First Crusade, and his brother Rogerio became a Crusader knight as well. (For those just tuning in, the Crusades were very very bad for Jews. Just gonna leave it at that for now. Go learn more if you’d like, but it’s not pretty.) Our guy became a monk.

Andreas, the archbishop of Bari, converted to Judaism sometime during the 11th century and inspired our monk to do the same. This decision seems to have coincided with his decision to get out of Crusader Europe, where, one imagines, being a former monastic convert to Judaism wouldn’t have been regarded as the best thing ever. We know that he converted formally in 1102, taking the name Ovadiah (“servant of God”).

Ovadiah wound up traveling to Constantinople (where he probably actually converted), Baghdad (where he learned to read and write Hebrew and study Bible alongside orphaned children), and Aleppo. And, indeed, one of the documents found in the geniza is a letter from Rabbi Baruch ben Isaac of Aleppo for Ovadiah, vouching for his conversion, and cautioning him to carry the letter at all times as proof of his Jewishness.

He then traveled to Damascus, Tyre, and by 1121 planned to head to Egypt. His memoir ends while he is still in Tyre, though it’s possible that he made it to Egypt and wrote from there. We do know that eventually his story somehow made its way into the genizah in Fustat, alongside so many other treasures.

And, of course, there was the music.

Image of Mi Al Har Horev manuscript

(You can hear all three of Ovadiah’s compositions here, set by Lukas Foss. Hit play and keep reading, or come back to this later; keep reading now. You can see full translations and transcriptions of the songs, and his story, here.)

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Was Ovadiah trying to show off his old aesthetic to his new culture? Would the music of the church have been welcomed or shunned in his Jewish Middle Eastern context? Would his compositions been regarded as, well, exotic and strange? Was this simply… the music on which he was raised and the music that he loved and knew how to write? How conscious was he of writing a “church chant” versus just “music from home” or “music from my childhood”? Did he write it? Was it an existing tune? There’s so much that we don’t know.

But, in any case, we do know that there was a passionate Jew by choice who came from a Crusader family, who came from the monastery, who traveled across time and place to bring us the first musical notation we have of Jewish music. It’s an amazing story, and a scholarly mystery that was only able to be solved by the miracle of the fact that he not only wrote music, but also his own story, and that both of these things happened to be preserved in an extraordinary treasure trove of history, waiting to be found almost a thousand years later.

Come on, it’s amazing.

And it reminds us once again not only that the stories of Jewishness and Judaism are beautiful and expansive, that they cross the globe (sometimes literally) and contain and absorb and engage with the cultures of which we Jews are a part in a myriad of ways, shaping and processing new inputs so that the come out somehow, paradoxically, inexplicably Jewish—Zoroastrian ideas seep into the Talmud, Aristotle into Guide to the Perplexed; Jewish cultures absorb ways of dressing and eating and customs about how to ward off evil and how to bring health and safety. We have always done this, and some syncretic ways of doing and being are more familiar to us because we have known them for a long time—Maimonides’ approach wasn’t universally beloved at the time, that’s for sure. But that doesn’t mean that the ongoing process of integration and refinement, of figuring out what it means to do this authentically and where the line is, is not quintessentially Jewish. (Requisite plug for Michael Twitty’s brand new book, KOSHERSOUL, btw)

And Jews by choice have been bringing the action for as long as we’ve had Jews. Obviously.

And this is also a powerful story of one man born into a family and community who decided to go on a deep and powerful spiritual journey—one that was hard and humbling, that involved having to literally learn the ABCs with a bunch of kids, one where he was forever exiled from home, because home wasn’t safe anymore, and where he’d always have to keep proof of identity on him, because his new home wasn’t entirely safe, either. It’s a story of letting go, of learning along the way, of finding a new home.

And of making art that, at last, integrates who you are now with who you’ve always been. Art of wholeness. Offerings to God of wholeness. Of integration. Of refusing to give up one part of the self because it’s inconvenient to where you are now, because it’s complicated, because it’s painful, because you can’t go back, because talking about oppressor and oppressed is weird and messy in your personal story, because prayer to God is prayer to God is prayer to God is prayer to God. Because maybe that’s enough?

I don’t know.

I just find Ovadiah’s whole story powerful, and I thought you might, too.

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(By the way, fellow Jew-nerds, this is a different Ovadiah the ger than the one with whom Maimonides corresponded—that one was a convert from Islam, and writing later, after this Ovadiah’s time).

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PS I got to podcast with the Bible For Normal People folks, talking ON REPENTANCE AND REPAIR—check it out here.

PPS OK yes

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