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Apr. 29, 2021 6:55 PM
In 1970, Israel Adler, then the director of Israel’s Jewish National and University Library, visited the Paris home of Rachel Mosseri, a Jewish exile from Nasser’s Egypt. Adler had a big mission, and limited time to carry it out – just 10 days to catalog and photograph the roughly 7,000 documents from the Cairo Genizah that constituted the collection assembled by Mosseri’s late husband, Jacques Mosseri, some six decades earlier.
From other caches, most notably that assembled by Solomon Schechter, the world of Jewish scholarship already recognized the long-concealed storage space of Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue as an incomparable source of Jewish books, documents and fragments that dated back at least 1,000 years. Not all of them were sacred texts; some were just “sacred trash,” as Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole titled their superb 2011 book about the genizah: letters, contracts, shippi
How many of the “1001 Nights” were Jewish ones?
This month marks the bicentenary of the birth of Richard F. Burton, the Victorian translator of “The Arabian Nights,” or “1001 Nights,” the medieval compendium of tales in Arabic about the storyteller Scheherazade, Aladdin, Ali Baba and Sindbad.
The stories date back over centuries across a wide range of national cultures, with the first trace printed in 9th century Iraq, so it is unsurprising that part of the lasting impact of “Alf Laylah wa-Laylah,” which Burton translated in 16 volumes as “The Thousand Nights and a Night,” should be its Yiddishkeit.
Historians have suggested that Burton, an explorer and ethnologist, resented the Jews for thwarting his diplomatic career when he was stationed in Syria in the aftermath of The Damascus Blood Libel.