150th Anniversary Edition People of the Book: Richard Sarason on Jacob Mann’s Cairo Genizah Work

Hebrew Union College professor Jacob Mann (1888-1940), who made significant contributions in the fields of medieval Jewish history and rabbinic literature, is the subject of a new book from Rabbi Richard Sarason, Ph.D. '74, Director of the Pines School of Graduate Studies, Professor of Rabbinic Literature and Thought, and The Deutsch Family Professor of Rabbinics and Liturgy. The volume, Jacob Mann: A Centennial Review (De Gruyter Brill, 2025) which Sarason co-edited with Stefan C. Reif of St. John's College at the University of Cambridge, U.K., is a collection of papers delivered at a conference held at St John's College, Cambridge in 2023. Sarason provides an updated biography of Mann and a bibliography of his scholarly writings, alongside other contributors to the volume, which showcases Mann as a scholar who was captivated by the riches of the Cairo Genizah and devoted his academic career to their exploration and publication. We recently spoke with Sarason at his office in Cincinnati about Mann's impact.

How did you come to this project investigating the life and work of Jacob Mann?

Richard Sarason: In 2021, I was contacted by my colleague Stefan Reif, who is the emeritus director of the Genizah Unit of the Cambridge University Library. He and I have known each other for a long time, and we both have an interest in the history of Jewish liturgy and ritual. He wrote asking if Hebrew Union College was planning anything to mark the centennial of Jacob Mann's major publications, which began when Mann joined the faculty in 1921. I told him that nothing had been planned or announced, and that was how we started to put together the 2023 conference in Cambridge, which the College kindly agreed to co-sponsor, assessing Mann's major works and his impact. My contribution on Mann's biography was prompted by the files that we hold here at the American Jewish Archives, as well as the Genizah materials that Mann purchased in Cairo in 1924 that are part of our collection of Genizah materials here in the Klau Library.

I should mention, too, that one of the other contributors to this volume is Jennifer Grayson, who is currently a faculty member at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, but was a junior faculty member at Hebrew Union College at the time when we were planning the conference. She has done a great deal of work on the social history of the Babylonian Geonic era (the early Islamic period) out of Genizah materials. She and I were both trading off letters that we found in the Archives and proved to be important for both of our pieces.

What makes Jacob Mann significant in the history of Hebrew Union College, and beyond as a scholar in his field?

RS: Jacob Mann's work on the Cairo Genizah brought him international fame in the academic world, since his materials and writings are still in use in Jewish Studies not only by scholars here in the U.S., but also in Israel and Europe. The most important thing that Mann did in his academic career was to publish hundreds and hundreds of these fragmentary texts, most of which now reside at the Cambridge University Library, the Oxford University Library, and the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. The Hebrew Union College Klau Library in Cincinnati also owns about 200 cataloged fragments.

Why are these fragments so important?

RS: Everybody knows about the Dead Sea Scrolls, right? But the Cairo Genizah contains a thousand times more material. It's a gold mine for the history and culture of early medieval Jewry, particularly, though not exclusively, in the Middle East and North Africa. There are letters from Maimonides, there are letters from Judah Halevi, autographs, holographs, all kinds of things that we never knew existed before this stuff was-well, it's not that it was discovered, it was only "discovered" by people in the West, because obviously the Cairo Jewish community always knew about it: it had been deposited over centuries in a storage room in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo.

Actually, the Genizah was already known in the West by the 1860s, almost 30 years before Solomon Schechter went there and took most of the materials back to Cambridge-although much material was still left there. Jacob Mann's work on these fragments is really, really important for Genizah studies. He published texts and studies in a variety of areas. The contents of our volume, and of the conference papers, reflect the variety of areas to which he made contributions on the basis of these Geniza materials that he transcribed, translated, analyzed, published, and, in a few instances, discovered: midrash, halakhah, liturgy, Jewish communal history, the Jewish calendar, messianism, and Karaism (an anti-rabbinic movement that began in Iraq in the ninth century).

What did Jacob Mann's work teach the world about the history of Jewish prayer and ritual?

RS: Mann's importance here was his publication of large quantities of liturgical materials from the Cairo Genizah, particularly fragments that followed the old rite of Eretz Yisrael, which was practiced there up through the period of the Crusades, and in Egypt for a full century afterwards.

For example, Mann published a lengthy article in the second volume of the Hebrew Union College Annual in 1925, in which he transcribed and analyzed hundreds of fragments of liturgical texts from the Genizah, more than anyone had published of those materials before that time. I've worked through a lot of that material, which has been very fascinating for me. And his work remains important for other researchers, scholars of Midrash, homiletics, and the history of Jewish ritual, particularly as it pertains to the liturgical reading of scripture.

Regarding the cycle of Torah readings, the Babylonian annual cycle, in which the liturgical reading of the Torah is begun and completed every year, is the one that we use today. The one that was used in Eretz Yisrael is known as the triennial cycle-it actually varied initially from locale to locale and could last between three-and-a-half and four years. Mann examined all of the midrashic homilies on these Torah readings that were in print and in manuscripts, and he tried to identify every Torah reading in the cycle as well as the corresponding Haftarah readings-the readings from the Prophets. He theorized that these prophetic readings were crucial for the construction of the homilies. It's an important piece of work, even if the grand theory was overstated.

As a Hebrew Union College faculty member, how do you incorporate Mann's work into your teaching and transmit his legacy to your students?

RS: When I'm teaching courses that deal with homiletical midrashim, I always mention Jacob Mann's work. In courses on Jewish liturgy, prayer, and ritual, I always make it a point to put Genizah materials in front of people, and particularly prayer texts from the old rite of Eretz Yisrael-in fact, I'm working on a syllabus now for the Virtual Pathway program for the spring semester that includes a lot of these materials. It's important to show students that there were other ways of phrasing prayers back then, that there was lots of liturgical poetry, and that we have manuscript evidence of all of this from Cairo going back to the 12th and 13th centuries. We have Haggadot from around the year 1000 that look quite different from what's done today. And some of this (but not the Haggadot) is material that Mann transcribed and published.

Decades ago, when my colleague Larry Hoffman and I were students here, Larry decided to create a service for the College synagogue out of materials from the Cairo Genizah that Mann and others had published, representing the old rite of the Land of Israel, to celebrate Balfour Day-the anniversary of the 1917 Balfour Declaration. I supplied the English translations and helped lead the service. Then, a little over ten years ago, I compiled a totally reworked and updated service on the basis additionally of materials that had been published since that time, along with detailed notes on the sources, so that we could use it in the College synagogue here during our Israel Exploration Week, when we also devoted lunchtime conversations to discussing aspects of Israel and to learning more about Israel.

Later, in January of 2024, we had a One-HUC delegation to Israel in the wake of the October 7 attacks. A group of faculty, students, administrators, staff, and Board members went on what was partly a fact-finding mission and was also about in-person solidarity with our Jerusalem colleagues, hearing their stories, and standing with them.

When we came back from that trip, I said, you know, we need to revive that service that was built around the Genizah materials from the old rite of the Land of Israel. After all, this was part of Israel, too. And, of course, I mentioned Mann and his work.

What is the significance of this book on Mann for Hebrew Union College as an institution?

RS: It's especially important that we pay tribute to Jacob Mann's considerable legacy with this volume now, in this year of the College's 150th anniversary. Over the last century and a half, there have been faculty members here, such as Mann, who have made major contributions to our knowledge of Judaism, Jewish history, and Jewish literature-in America and around the world. And too often these people tend to be forgotten, because of the presentism of American culture. I think it's essential, during this year of our sesquicentennial, to celebrate the chain of tradition here, the work of our predecessors, and to make it-and them-tangible for our students and ourselves. We stand on their shoulders.