Inspired by and modelled after the Genizah at Kolkata’s Jewish cemetery, this site specific project explores the notions of historiography and memory in the Jewish-Indian context. Kolkata’s Jewish cemetery hosts two Genizahs: One is a repository in which old and damaged books are collected through a small window in its domed and circular structure, while the other – following the Jewish custom – is sealed in the ground.
The Hebrew linguistic stem of Genizah encompasses twofold meaning: It indicates both archiving and burying, storing and putting away. The Genizah is both a grave and an archive, a closure and an opening, the sealing of the past which yet enables its future reading. Tradition’s memory, as the Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi observes, is forever partial and selective. For instance, the marble commemorative plaque on the Kolkata’s Genizah is dedicated to Joseph Rahamim who was born in Cochi and died at the age of seventy-five in Bombay.
Tradition does not only select whom to commemorate and whom to dis(re)member, but also chooses the events to be recalled: Rahamim was an old man, born in Cochi, died in Bombay, his mother’s name was Ida Rahamim… Historicism, on the other hand, a discourse which emerged in the 19th century and still forms our vision of humanities, is motivated by the ambition to preserve every deed and every fact. Nevertheless, like culture’s memory, history is conditioned by the Genizah’s duality of paper and earth.
Whereas past’s remoteness enables its reading, it remains opaque and impermeable, resisting the historian’s endeavours to mark its presence. Moreover, in its attempt to examine the past “objectively”, modern historiography detaches itself from its object of study and thus buries it once again in the ground.
