What Can Texts Do? A Morning at the National Library of Israel
Almost everything that holds my life together arrived in writing. The recipes I cook from, scribbled onto index cards I can barely read. The music I hum, once written down by its composer. The Torah I learn, copied by hand, letter by letter, for thousands of years. I had never thought of these as belonging to the same category until July 28, when I took a tour of the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem.
The guide, a woman named Shelly, opened up the tour by bringing us back outside. Craning my neck up, I took in the library’s imposing building, topped with a concave, sloped roof and riddled with holes. “What do you think the shape of the building is made to look like?” she asked, and smiled to herself with the answers of “a scroll,” “an opened book,” “the Kotel” and “a weirdly shaped piece of matza!” Shelly explained that while she often hears those answers, she believes they are a result of our minds trying to fit the building into our expectations of what should be the deeper meaning of the library of Israel. In reality, the building, designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, sits on a sloped triangular lot between the Knesset and the Israel Museum. The building was designed to rise on one side toward the Knesset and to dip down on the other so that the view from the Israel Museum would not be blocked. The holes in the walls serve a different, utilitarian, purpose. They allow rooms filled with ancient books a small dose of natural light that won’t damage the pages.
Our group was then led back inside, and Shelly raised a question I had never thought to ask: how does a national library get its books? She explained that there are three ways. The first is by law. Israel’s Books Law of 2000 requires anyone who publishes anything in Israel to deposit two copies to the library within a month of publication, so that the library houses every Israeli novel, cookbook, siddur and children’s book. The second is by purchase, which is how the library fills in what was printed before 1948 and outside of Israel. The third is by donation, and a surprising number of the treasures we saw came from families who decided to donate their personal belongings to the collective. Between these three methods of acquisition, the library has built a collection of about 5 million volumes.
The oldest items in the collection are in the first display case. They are clay incantation bowls made by the Jews of Babylonia between roughly the fifth and eighth centuries, and they look like ordinary cereal bowls, except that the inside of each one is covered in Aramaic script that spirals from the center outward. They are amulets. People commissioned them by name, had them inscribed with blessings and incantations, and then buried them upside down beneath the threshold of the house so that demons could not get in. Nobody was ever supposed to read them; we only have them because they were buried intentionally and then unearthed. The plaque above the case ends by asking the question the entire exhibit is built around: what can texts actually do?
Rare manuscripts are displayed differently from everything else. Each one sits under its own glass canopy, lit in a way that causes the object to seem like it is glowing. This is a deliberate way of showing that these are objects with the power to change reality. The signage makes the case that gathering sacred writings into collections is what lends them authority, and that those collections go on to shape a community’s identity. The Tanach and the Talmud sit in that room, and so do the Quran and Christian scripture.
The Gemara on display comes from the first complete printed edition of the Babylonian Talmud, produced in Venice between 1519 and 1523. The printer was Daniel Bomberg, a Christian from Antwerp who employed rabbis and Jewish scholars in his shop and received permission from both the Venetian Senate and the pope. Building on a layout that the Soncino family had used earlier for individual tractates, Bomberg fixed the format that now feels inevitable, with the Gemara in the center of the page, Rashi along the inner margin and Tosafot along the outer margin. He also added something nobody had thought to include, which was page numbers. Standing there, I found it fascinating to think that every daf yomi shiur in the world today is centered around the same page because of decisions made by a non-Jewish printer 5 hundred years ago.
The library’s Haggadah collection is the largest in the world, with some 15,000 editions, and it works almost like a gallery of Jewish visual art. The Haggadot across centuries are filled with fascinating illustrations, and the styles shift with each country and era. There are hand-painted medieval manuscripts on parchment, woodcuts from 16th-century Prague, copperplate engravings from 18th-century Amsterdam and modern editions from kibbutzim, all illustrating the same text. Shelly mentioned that a single medieval parchment Haggadah could require the skins of eight to 10 sheep.
The strangest Haggadah in the collection is one almost nobody has seen. In 1952, the IDF commissioned the author Aharon Megged to write a Haggadah of Independence for soldiers to use at their Yom Ha’Atzmaut meals. It follows the structure of the Pesach Haggadah closely, and then it takes Hashem out of the story completely. Our Haggadah is explicit that no angel and no messenger brought us out of Mitzrayim, that it was Hashem alone. This version hands the credit to the Israel Defense Forces. Ten thousand copies were printed and distributed. The chief rabbis promptly demanded that it be shelved, and Ben-Gurion ordered every copy collected and destroyed. Roughly 20 have survived. The library has two of them, kept in the same collection as the Haggadot Jews have been writing and illustrating for centuries, including the ones that cost a flock of sheep to make.
By the time I left, I understood why so many different kinds of texts had ended up under the same roof. The library is not organized by what is ancient and what is modern, or even by what is Jewish and what is not. It is organized by what people believed was worth keeping. That is how a fifth-century incantation bowl no one was ever meant to read ends up a few rooms away from a Haggadah rushed into print in 1952 and almost erased by government order. That is how a Venetian Christian’s decision about where to place a page number still shapes shiurim happening all over the world today. The building holds 5 million volumes, but what it really holds is 5 million decisions that something mattered enough to survive.
I keep coming back to the writing that makes up every day of my life, and how strange it is that my to-do lists belong to the same impulse as a manuscript ringed in gold leaf or a bowl buried upside down beneath someone’s doorstep. None of those objects cared whether they would be called ancient or modern one day. They were just trying to get something true past the limits of a single lifetime. I think that is the real answer to the question the exhibit keeps asking. A text survives because someone, somewhere, decided it was worth writing down.
Photo Caption: This Gemara comes from the first complete printed edition of the Babylonian Talmud, produced in Venice between 1519 and 1523.
Photo Credit: Keira Kahn
