First-Person Outsider

An interesting observation of language and identity politics at work on my penultimate day in Jerusalem:

The clerk at the hotel desk was an Arab Jerusalemite, more or less my age. I asked him, in English, if he could book a "nesher," for me to the airport for Saturday afternoon, using the name of the company that provides the shared taxi service between Jerusalem and Ben Gurion Airport. He seemed confused about what I wanted, so I circumlocuted, still in English, until I made myself clear.

"Oh," he answered me. "You mean a nayshur. You said nesher. That's something else."

I don't have any Palestinian colloquial Arabic so I don't know what either of those words means in dialect; but he clearly wanted me to use the local Arabic pronunciation and not the Hebrew pronunciation of the word.

It was too early for him to book the taxi, so I tried again after my morning at the library. This time I spoke in Hebrew, because he had seemed confused about my initial request beyond the pronunciation of the name of the taxi company. He booked the taxi and was explaining to me that even though I had asked for one at 4, the company would be running pickups at 1 and 5; and every time he wanted to emphasize something, he would repeat what he had just said, still in Hebrew, but with this very fake affected American accent on top of it. (And I should add — I don't sound like an American when I speak Hebrew.)

The whole pair of encounters was just a completely fascinating scene from a city with a really complex set of relationships between language and identity.

Giv'at Ram Cinematheque

Much of my last week has been spent in the Nehemia Allony Memorial Reading Room of the Institute for Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts. The IMHM is a sort of combined triumph of Zionism and German philology — a repository of microfilmed copies of 90% of the Hebrew manuscripts that existed in the world in the 1950s, obtained sometimes only through great efforts to convince the custodian libraries to let their collections be filmed. If you want to do research on Hebrew manuscripts that are dispersed across many collections, this is the place to start.

Colloquially it's referred to as the "cinematheque" because everyone sits in front of screens with reels of film. (It also features in the film "Footnote.")

The readers are a really interesting mix of secular academics, religious academics and religious lay people who are there to study text.

To be sure, it drives home the problems inherent in reading manuscripts on microfilm, especially films that were created half a century ago with photographic technology that would be considered seriously substandard today. Any flaws in the page or in the script are magnified exponentially. Smudges you might be able to read through on a page obliterate text on film, and lighter marks disappear completely.

Even though some films contain exposures every scrap of paper tucked into the binding (relevant or not), in most cases, things like flyleaves and endpapers, which are really important in ownership studies since that's often where people write their names, are not filmed and so it's really hard to judge certain additional characteristics of the manuscript history.

It's great for a broad survey, but I'd never want to work like this in any kind of sustained way. Nevertheless, it's still a remarkable collection.

And of course, it's always on the last day that you find a page like this one:

Be-Ga'avah

Security was very tight as I left the national library, on the Giv'at Ram campus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which is more or less across the street from the Israeli parliament building. As I walked down the hill back towards the center of town, there were pairs of police officers stationed no further than five yards apart from each other, all the way down the main road; it's almost a three mile walk to the major intersection where I was headed and the security only got tighter. Streets were closed and blockaded with police cars, and the sidewalks were taped off. I assumed that a motorcade with a high-level diplomatic delegation would be making its way to the parliament building. It was security unlike security I have ever seen in Jerusalem, even at the height of the disengagement controversy in 2005.

And when I finally got to the crest of the hill where Rambam becomes Agron and mets up with Keren ha-Yesod and King George, I found myself literally in the middle of the Jerusalem gay pride parade.

I grew up in San Francisco and live in New York, which is to say that this was singularly the tamest gay pride parade I have ever seen. It was really also the most moving, though. Right-wing religious zealots have a history of perpetrating violent hate crimes against gay people in Israel, and of targeting the parade in particular, hence the dramatic security. People here were really putting themselves at risk of harm for the sake of being visible and agitating for equality; and they did it anyway.

One thing that was interesting to note during this trip was that, especially with the ongoing controversy over what constitutes things like "custom," "modesty," and "propriety," as it relates to how Jewish women can pray in public and at sacred sites, the people I was meeting and speaking with generally seemed a lot more interested in issues of gender and sexual orientation as they play into questions of how to balance religious and secular life than they were in the matzav, the "situation" with the Palestinians.  (And in spite of what others are saying* in the vaguely academic corners of the blogosphere, the law and its enforcement is starting — slowly, to be sure, but, I hope, steadily — to catch up.)

In Hebrew, ga'avah is the word for pride, which yields a nice bilingual play on words that is often played up in slogans — the adjective derived from it, the word that means proud, is ge'eh, (pronounced like "gay" but with a glottal stop in the middle).

*Yes, I am having a bona fide "somebody is wrong on the internet" moment.

Two Angles on the Temple Mount

From the tower of the Lutheran church in the old city:

And from Mount Scopus with a long lens on a dusty afternoon:

Shuq Mahaneh Yehudah

I've been eating fruit and vegetables and freshly baked bread from the market every day since I've been here. Since I'm generally useless before I give talks, I went over there to take pictures this morning before heading up to the conference.

In addition to the infinite quantity of figs, there is some of the very best people watching in the world to be done there.

The Book Display!

The last time I was at the World Congress of Jewish Studies was not the previous one four years ago but rather two congresses ago, in 2005. I had just graduated from college, was living in Jerusalem and basically just went up for one day to hear a friend who is somewhat more senior to me in the profession give a paper. Going back, I have the sense that I must have been a little kid then. Everything seemed a lot smaller and more manageable this time.

Tomorrow I give my paper and I will listen to papers on Wednesday, as well.

But today was for meeting colleagues and buying books. When I was last at the World Congress this friend and I each bought a copy of Joshua Blau's descriptive grammar of Judaeo-Arabic and then went out to the botanic garden and had a race to see who would exclaim "Cool!" first while reading. That is the kind of dork I was and am and associate with. (Although I don't actually associate with that particular dork anymore.) This time, though, I was looking for text editions, which is pretty much what I've limited myself to buying these days; and this book fair is actually a pretty inexpensive way of buying books (all told, the one pictured below plus one that I picked up at the request of a colleague was just under $100 US) and so I bought three editions that I needed:

I also purchased this earth-shatteringly important work of Hebrew literature:

(The really funny thing is that the way that they've translated "terrible-horrible," as "ayom ve-nora" makes it sound like Alexander and Yom Kippur.)

I recently submitted an abstract for a paper on the seriously confused provenance of a Hebrew Alexander the Great manuscript to an edited volume under the title "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Codes." The paper was accepted, but I was told that I definitely could not keep the title. They have to let me use it now, right?

The Gregor Samsa Museum of North African Jewish Heritage

After going to the library this morning, I went to the museum at the David Amar Center for North African Jewish Heritage, as the museum had recently been restored and was supposed to be quite nice and home to a newly-created Moroccan patio, a la the installation in the Islamic galleries at the Met.

When I arrived, there was a sign at the door that asked visitors to ring the bell. I did. A woman answered, and I said I was there to see the museum. She told me to open the door when it buzzed. I did.

It's a very small collection, entirely of late nineteenth- and twentieth-century metal and textile objects from Morocco and Algeria.

This eternal flame canister is particularly interesting because it is dedicated to the memory of Judah Halevi, showing how the memory of the high literary culture of medieval Spain has persisted.

I walked upstairs and started to take photographs from the second story of the center patio/courtyard, which goes all the way up the interior of the three-story building. To be frank, the craftsmanship is far inferior to the one at the Met.

After just a few frames,  a man came out of his office, and the following conversation transpired:

Man: Who are you?

Me: My name is Sarah. I came to see the museum.

Man: You can't be here. You cannot see the museum. (He looks over the railing in the balcony at two other people who have come in and are on the ground floor, and continues, shouting.) Nu, friends! You cannot be here! You cannot see the museum! You must call and make an appointment and go with a  group. You cannot just look around by yourself! (Then he turns to shout just at me.) What do you think you are doing here? You cannot be here. There are people working here!

Me: I'm sorry, it's just that the woman who answered the bell said I could come in.

Man: What woman?

Me: I don't know! Whoever is the woman who answers your bell! I'm really sorry! I'll leave now!

Exeunt.

Department of Antiquities, 1927

Overheard from Medieval Cairo

The two Mizrahi men sitting to my right  in the capacious lobby of the Jerusalem YMCA are hammering out the details of a bill for repair work to be sent to a certain Hajjaj b. Yosef. I feel ever so slightly like I'm sitting in a Genizah document — and maybe a little bit more sympathetic to the early Genizah scholars who found it so easy to use their modern world as a store of comparanda for the medieval one.

Prayers #20 and #21 for Peace

Rechov Agripas, Jerusalem