Free Sacred Trash by Adina Hoffman

dissertation, he said, because he “felt that there was some secret about Ecclesiasticus which had not yet been explained.” (Little did he know.) But now, heannounced, he had the key and so was ready to release his thoughts on Ben Sira to the world.

    ( Photo Credit 3.3 )
    Margoliouth’s lecture examined the question of textual authenticity in Ben Sira and concluded that the true nature of the lost Second Temple book is best reflected in the less-than-perfect mirror of the extant Greek and Syriac versions and, curiously, that a Hebrew replica could be worked up so as to provide scholars with a reliable sense of what the original Hebrew conveyed. And this he proceeded to do. He’d later claim that the original was not in fact “lost” but deliberately “destroyed,” which is what he suggests is the true meaning of the g-n-z root that gives us the word geniza. (Margoliouth was known for having what one writer has called “the kind of beautiful mind that could see patterns where none existed” and who instead of telling his dog to “ ‘Sit!’ … would order it to ‘Assume the recumbent position!’ ”) “It is a strange feeling,” he told his Oxford audience, “after reading some pages in illustration of a peculiar saying or expression to find that that saying or expression never existed.”
    The “key” that led Margoliouth to the convoluted argument of his lecture was his realization that the language of Ben Sira was, in all probability, not the “classical” Hebrew of the Prophets, but rather a mongrel and quantitatively metrical sort of “post-biblical language,” incorporating “vulgar” Hebrew as well as elements of “Chaldean [Aramaic] and Syriac.” The replicated text, Margoliouth asserted, showed that there was in fact a huge gulf between the diction and syntax (and thought) of Ben Sira and that of “the grave of the Old-Hebrew and the Old-Israel.” While Margoliouth was by no means a higher—or for the most part evena Bible—critic (he argued aggressively for revelation and held wholly distinct theories of dating), he shared Higher Criticism’s tendency to disparage postbiblical Judaism and to see in the history of Hebrew violent disjunction and decline rather than continuity and organic evolution. (“What a descent!” he calls it in another essay.) And in coming to his conclusions Margoliouth pointedly dismissed the many Hebrew passages of Ben Sira that appear in early midrashic literature, which he snidely referred to as “the whole rabbinic farrago.” Needless to say, Hebraic hackles were raised. For Schechter in particular, Margoliouth’s lecture amounted to the casting down of a gauntlet.
    Margoliouth was Schechter’s foil in every way. Where Schechter was educated in patchwork if serious fashion in a variety of European institutions, including the yeshiva, hadn’t earned a doctorate, and was, as a non-Anglican, never granted a chair at Cambridge, Margoliouth, twelve years his junior, was an Orientalist whose prodigious learning (reflected in erudite publications examining texts in Persian, Hebrew, Sanskrit, Arabic, and Greek) earned him a prestigious professorship at Oxford and prize after prize—such that “he ceased to be quite human,” as one eulogist would put it. In Cambridge the impulsive Schechter worked away with an all-consuming, Hasidic zeal; at Oxford Margoliouth was known as a cold contrarian and serial debunker—of, for example, the authenticity of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and the Elephantine Hebrew papyri. (“Never was a learned man less apt to wax enthusiastic over the value of learning,” observed Gilbert Murray, the well-known British classicist and translator.) And while Schechter sought throughout his life to demonstrate the unbroken line of Jewish vitality through the ages, Margoliouth saw Judaism through an apostate’s eyes, arguing for the relevance of Ben Sira not to Jewish continuity, but to the Greek New Testament.
    A year after being