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Professor authors medieval romance

By Michele Alperin

October 10, 2008

Rabbi Burton Visotzky, professor of midrash and interreligious studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary, is not only a scholar of the genre of rabbinical narrative known as midrash but also a teller of tales in his own right.

On Sept. 23 at the Jewish Center in Princeton, Visotzky introduced his new novel, "A Delightful Compendium of Consolation: A Fabulous Tale of Romance, Adventure and Faith in the Medieval Mediterranean" to an audience of 40.

He began with the story of two Scotch Presbyterian widows who, as discoverers of the Cairo Geniza, were also, in a sense, midwives to his novel. Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, dubbed Aggie and Maggie by Visotzky, were two scholarly widows, twins whose combination of scholarly passion and Christian devotion led them to what is now called the Cairo Geniza, a storeroom in an old synagogue in Fustat, Egypt, where old documents and texts written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Judeo-Arabic were stored.

These texts, which included the detritus of everyday life and commerce as well as religious documents, provided the historical basis for Visotzky's novel about the adventures of a Jewish Karaite woman in 11th-century North Africa.

The novel's action begins when the protagonist, Karimah, runs off with the Muslim son of her father's business partner. Sharing a business with a Muslim was standard for Jews of that period to avoid the problem of having to buy protection for long-distance caravans that traveled over the Sabbath. In the 11th century, Jews were a protected minority, called dhimmi, in Moslem society, and the wealthy Karaite who became the power behind the throne under the Fatimid empire in Egypt also became, in the novel, a relative of Karimah's father.

Although Visotzky had a 19-year-old daughter at home when he started the book, Karimah was entirely her own person. "The characters came alive," Visotzky said. "All you're doing is channeling."

Shoshana Silberman, a Jewish Center congregant and a Jewish educator, is looking forward to reading Visotzky's new novel. "Rabbi Visotzky has a dynamic way of making history come alive," she said. "I also love a good story. So, I am most eager to read his first novel. If he writes as well as he speaks, it should be a winner."

Visotzky's fictional characters are imaginative creations that are also rooted in period texts, including the tales of the Arabian nights that were circulating in the 11th century as well as texts from the Geniza ranging from shopping and laundry lists to lists of caravan and shipping merchandise to trousseaus and wedding contracts. S.D. Goitein's six-volume opus on the Cairo Geniza documents, "A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza," even contains communal details like who gave tzedakah and who received it and what Hebrew-school teachers were paid.

Among the religious texts found in the Cairo Geniza was the compilation of midrashim, "A Delightful Compendium of Consolation" by Rabbenu Nissim -- a teacher at a well-known Talmudic academy in Kairawan (now Tunisia) -- that gave Visotzky's novel its name. Visotzky interweaves many of these midrashim into letters from Rabbenu Nissim, to Karimah's father, consoling him for the "loss" of his daughter.

Visotzky was excited to learn that Rabbenu Nissim had also kept a journal, but it turned out to be a notebook where he noted his difficulties with Talmudic texts. Yet it gave Visotzky an opportunity to use authorial discretion and transform the journal into a diary where he could portray Rabbenu Nissim's feelings.

Even the Karimah character, although something of a super heroine, was historically based. She portrayed qualities that different individual women in that society possessed -- they were warriors and business people; they traveled in caravans; and they could read and write. What was not realistic was to have all these qualities in one woman.

Rabbi Annie Tucker, assistant rabbi at the Jewish Center, appreciated that her former professor's new novel was steeped in his 11th-century history and texts. "Dr. Visotzky is a master story teller who combines the drama of great fiction with the academic rigor of great scholarship," she said. "His presentation was humorous, whimsical, and deeply intriguing. It was a delight to listen to him!"

As he researched his novel, Visotzky visited every city that his characters lived in or visited, except Baghdad. Sadly, in Kairawan -- whose 11th-century yeshiva was headed by Rabbi Hananel, a Talmudic commentator -- Visotzky was assured that there had never been Jews in Kairawan.

Visotzky wrote about two-thirds of the book in the summer of 2001, stopping in September when the fall semester began. With the tragedy of Sept. 11, however, the story took on new meanings for Visotzky and the writing itself took on a different tone. "I can show you the page -- here is where Sept. 11 happened," he said, "because the book is my way of keeping faith that Jews can live with Muslims in peace."

Visotzky has also made some changes in his life as a result. He has committed himself to learning Arabic, and having worked with a tutor all summer and into the current semester, he can now read haltingly in the Koran. He has also been very involved in Jewish-Muslim dialogue, including a July conference in Madrid hosted by Saudi King Abdullah, where the opening luncheon in the palace was a kosher meal. He has also been involved in a dialogue project between Jewish students and staff at the Jewish Theological Seminary and Muslims from the 96th Street Mosque.

It is perhaps apt, though, that the tale of Visotzky's book began with the curiosity of two widowed scholars of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic who were also the creators of a dictionary of Syriac.

While touring Christian sites in the Middle East, Aggie and Maggie were told by a guide that he could take them to the place where Moses was put into the bulrushes. At that site, he added, was also a synagogue with a room guarded by genies (geniza was pronounced then with a soft letter gee) where they could find a Torah scroll written by the scribe Ezra.

The ladies visited the synagogue, found the Geniza, and returned to England with a manuscript in Judeo-Arabic, written in Hebrew letters. "It bothered them," Visotzky said. "It was the first time they were confronted with a Semitic manuscript that they couldn't read."

Eventually the text found its way into the hands of the Lubavitcher Rabbi Shneur Zalman, who today we know as Solomon Schechter. He recognized the Hebrew text as part of the Apocrypha, which was banned from the Hebrew Bible but had become part of the Christian Bible, and he immediately understood the significance of the Cairo Geniza.

Schechter raised the money he would need for travel and bribes and returned to England with 140,000 manuscripts and fragments. Extant today are a quarter-million texts ranging from the 9th to the 19th century.

For Visotzky, the story of Karimah that was birthed in the texts of the Cairo Geniza took on a life of its own, and he was just along for the ride. "Having plotted out the rabbinic literature and the Arabian nights, it was 10 percent done and the characters took over," he said. "It was a roller-coaster ride, fun, and it felt like the muse was upon me. I felt like it was God's grace and the Shechinah was with me."