Example #1: Samaritan Epistles

In 1583 Joseph Scaliger published De Emendatione Temporium and “rediscovered” for Europe the Samaritans of Shechem (present day Nabulus), Ottoman Palestine and their unique Samaritan Pentateuch (Montgomery, 3). Scaliger’s publication then set in motion a 250-year exchange of epistles between individual scholars in Europe and the Samaritan communities in Cairo and Shechem. The publication of Scalinger’s work influenced European scholars to continue the work on the Samaritans, and additional epistles were sent to Palestine. Almost a century later in 1671, British scholar Robert Huntington visited Palestine and tricked the Samaritans into believing that he represented their “long lost brethren” from Europe. This deceit then set in motion another wave of epistles, this time addressed to their brothers in England (5). When the epistles arrived in England, they were not immediately delivered to Huntington:

The first epistle came into the hands of Thomas Marshall of Oxford… who in 1675 addressed a Hebrew epistle to the Samaritans, which informed them that the writers were of the race of Kapheth; its substance was a pious attempt to proselytize the sect for the Christian Messiah. Huntington forwarded this letter, accompanied by one from himself. (6)

Samaritan letter of response
Translated from the Samaritan by Jim Ridolfo 3.15.2010
In the name of Y-H-V-H, our G-d and the G-d of our fathers, we begin (this letter) with the reminder of his name in our hands. May peace be upon you, my dear brother, with love close to my heart: May G-d protect you and may you have many more days! I give you notice that your letter reached us, and that there has been from us much joy, and what you said was already in our hearts. In this letter, you proposed to us questions in Arabic about the Hebrew language. This language, the Hebrew language, is known to my brothers and we believe in the Law of Moses and what it prescribes. You say, my brother, that he is among you anyone of us brothers who keep the Law of Moses, our prophet is the one thing that we do not believe, consequently we have sent to you a Torah (to your country). You are to us our brothers. ….

Huntington’s deceit in pretending to be one of their long lost Brethren is propagated long after his death. After the exchanges of 1675, the exchange of epistles continues with other scholars from Paris and England well into the 19th century. Because of Huntingtons deceit, these 19th century epistles continued to reflect the belief that the Samaritans had long lost brothers in Paris and England. Consequently, the 150 years after Huntington’s lie the Samaritans continued to address their epistles to the Samaritans of Paris, England, etc.

Example #2: The Nofet Zufim, 1475 CE

A little known fact in the history of rhetoric is that in 1475 Mantua, Italy the first Hebrew book of rhetoric, the Nofet Zufim or the Book of Honeycomb’s Flow, is also one of the first three books ever published on the Hebrew printing press. Of the two other books, the Nofet Zufim is the only book published during the lifetime of its author, Italian Rabbi and Philosopher Jehudah Messer Leon. According to Rhetoric and Jewish Studies scholars Arthur Lesley, Robert Bonfil, and Isaac Rabinowitz, Messer Leon is the first scholar to engage the work of Averros, Cicero, and Quintilian in a Hebraic context. While Avraham Conat published Messer Leon’s rhetoric, Messer Leon was embroiled in political controversy within the Jewish community of Mantua. In the same year his book of rhetoric was published, he was expelled from Mantua, Italy and died a few years later. In addition, Messer Leon has the dubious distinction of issuing the first rabbinic decree banning the publication of a text on the Hebrew printing press, Gersonides’ Commentary on the Pentateuch (Bonfil, VII).

Consequently, there has been 35-year-old debate in Jewish Studies and Rhetoric as to whether or not Messer Leon had a direct hand in the publication of his manuscript, and if so, did Messer Leon see the publication of his book as a strategic political advantage. This debate has significant importance for rhetorical delivery, perhaps all the more so because Messer Leon’s book of rhetoric references only an oral understanding of delivery. In other words, Messer Leon’s own practice allude to an understanding of delivery that sharply diverges from Greek and Roman rhetoric.

Jewish Studies scholar Robert Bonfil posits that Messer Leon’s censorship decree shows that he is, “conscious of the possibilities that printing offered of spreading new ideas and influencing people” (“Nofet Zufim,” VII). Isaaz Rabinowitz disagrees, arguing that Messer Leon had no role in the production because Avraham Conat, the owner of the press, published an inferior, error-laden version of the Nofet Zufim:

Comparison… shows clearly that Conat, in the course of printing the volume, made many errors both of omission and of commission, errors that JML would never have overlooked or allowed to stand had he anything to do with seeing the work through the press. (Rabinowitz, xxx-xxxi)

However, Jewish Studies scholar Hava Tirosh-Samuelson argues that Rabinowitzs’ analysis does not fully consider Messer Leon’s political activities in relationship to the publication of the manuscript:

No mention is made, for example, of the tension within the Italian Jewish community, of Messer Leon’s leaning towards the Ashkenazic legal system, especially rabbinic ordination, or of the impact of the newly-invented printing press on Jewish learning, all of which are relevant to his decision to publish Nophet Suphim. (“The book of the Honeycomb’s,” 237-238).

In the end, Jewish Studies and Rhetorical Studies scholar Arthur Lesley may have the most definitive conclusion to date on the subject, when he says that, “There is, of course, need for additional evidence on the subject,” and that, consequently, ”the scarcity of the documents indicates caution” (“Sefer,” 314) (“Review,” 106).

So what exactly do these two 500 hundred plus year old examples have to do with a panel focused on the circulation of (mostly) digital texts? I’d argue that the problem of nonlinearity and delivery is not new, but as I hope these examples show, extremely old. Furthermore, what these two stories overwhelmingly lack, and what we need most today, are stories of practitioner knowledge. We don’t really know what Messer Leon thought about the publication of his manuscript on the printing press (or, at the time, a thousand magical pens), what Messer Leon learned from this activity, or the rhetorical outcome of the Nofet Zufim.

For the Samaritan epistles, we can theorize how the temporality, geographic distance, and non-linear delivery of the epistles had an impact on the rhetorical situations. However we don’t know much about the exact moment Huntington chose to deceive the Samaritians. We also don’t know much about the specific moments of delivery. What was it like for a messenger to walk the streets of 19th century Paris with a message for the Samaritans of France? How did scholars take delivery of these manuscripts? How did they rhetorically understand this process of delayed, non-linear communication? Conversely, we know very little about how the Samaritans collectively authored their responses to European scholars, or how they understood this long distance, long term exchange of texts.

I would argue that these two examples can help us to explain just how extremely difficult it can be to locate and articulate practitioner knowledge in present-day instances of circulation. The knowledge these rhetoricians had about these rhetorical moments, activities, and processes is largely lost or, at the very least, extremely difficult for archival scholars to utilize; they also remind us that the knowledge of circulation isn’t simply in the movement, transmission, or reformation of the text, but in the unique relationship the rhetoricians have with their delivered text, the ability to watch how their rhetorical dominoes cascade, learn from watching how these processes of delivery unfold, and then use the results of this practitioner knowledge in future cycles of delivery.

John Schilb’s talk, “Turning Composition toward Sovereignty,” was more a reminder to English Studies that the “drive-by Foucault quote” is not the only way to approach the question of agency. Basically, Schilb argued (and I think correctly) that Foucault never said anywhere that the State ceased its use of violent, corporeal force once it developed more insidious forms of control over its subjects’ psyches. On the contrary, as Schilb correctly pointed out, State violence is alive and well in the form of torture and internment.

Jaschik accurately highlights the above point from Schilbs’ talk, but I was very disappointed that the article did not mention Schilb’s praise of Scott Lyons’s work on rhetorical sovereignty or Schilb’s nod to the other scholarly work in cultural rhetorics. Although Schilb did not mention Malea Powell, Ellen Cushman, Qwo-Li Driskill, Angela Haas, Kendall Leon, Doug Walls, Collin Craig, Victor Vitanza by name, these scholars are very much concerned with issues of cultural/rhetorical sovereignty, State power, and bodies. While the growing field of cultural rhetorics is by no means limited to the work of the aforementioned scholars, surely the field has developed significantly because of them and their work.

Jaschik also apparently missed the point that College English, the journal Schilb edits, is not an exclusively rhet/comp journal. Therefore Schilb’s disappointment over the scarcity of politically informed submissions is not a critique of rhetoric and composition alone, but rather English Studies scholarship more broadly conceived.

Arabella Lyon’s talk, “Composition and the Preservation of Rhetorical Traditions in a Global Context,” would also benefit from a more careful consideration of the cultural rhetorics research I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Lyon argued that we should address the “intellectual bankruptcy of the humanities in the university today.” Scholars tempted to complain about the humanities and new media might do well to look into the growing number of digital projects that involve cultural stakeholders. For example, Ellen Cushman’s multimedia, web-authoring students have done important work in cooperation with the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, producing a brilliant educational DVD on the Allotment period for Cherokee youth as a final course product. Projects such as Cushman’s should be highlighted as exemplary digital humanities research models because they increase engagement, undergraduate cultural learning while building collaborative research relationships.

The third talk, “What Composition Can Learn from the Digital Humanities,” was a pleasure for any rhetoric/composition scholar even though Bjork and Schwartz are not rhet/comp scholars by training; Bjork is a Miltonist and Schwartz is a Modernist and both hail from the literature side of the English department at U. Texas-Austin. Bjork and Schwartz did exactly what Lyon didn’t do, but probably should have: they searched for examples of digital humanities projects that corresponded with the claims they made about students’ pedagogical needs. The digital humanities examples in their talk focused primarily on literature and the teaching of literature: the famous William Blake archive, a multimedia Spanish poetry project, and several examples of classroom datamining practices. And while their focus was literature-based, it was informed by a desire to enhance humanities-based instruction through the purposeful use of digital technology, a desire that many in rhetoric and composition studies, especially those using the new media that Lyon was quick to dismiss, share.

In short, there was no “new direction for rhet/comp” at MLA this year as Jaschik claimed. Rather, English Studies as a whole needs to think about (1) corporeal State violence (Schilb) and (2) new digital [humanities] pedagogies (Schwartz & Bjork). In turn, those concerned about a general crisis in the humanities might benefit (and consider participating in) a growing number of digital cultural rhetorics/digital humanities projects.

By Jennifer Howard

The Samaritans of biblical fame still exist, although their numbers are small: The current community, split between Holon, Israel, and Mount Gerizim in the West Bank, numbers just over 700 people. In 1901, a Michigan industrialist named E.K. Warren traveled to the Middle East and was asked to bring home a collection of sacred Samaritan objects for safekeeping. The objects include prayer books and centuries-old versions of the Samaritan Pentateuch, or Torah, which has some significant differences from the Jewish Pentateuch. The collection has been housed ever since at Michigan State University.

In 2007, as a graduate student at Michigan State, James Ridolfo came across an electronic index to the collection. He got in touch with a Samaritan elder, Binyamin Tsedaka, who had been asking Michigan State to “promote Samaritan studies.” Working with William Hart-Davidson, co-director of the university’s Writing in Digital Environments (WIDE) Research Center, Mr. Ridolfo set out to design an “Archive 2.0″ project with input from the so-called cultural stakeholders, the Samaritans.

The Samaritan Archive 2.0 Project recently received a start-up grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities, and Mr. Ridolfo and Mr. Hart-Davidson have written a white paper describing the archive’s evolution and the Archive 2.0 approach. The Chronicle asked them to talk about how they used Archive 2.0 principles to design the Samaritan archive. They answered together by e-mail. Individual responses are noted.

Q. How does an Archive 2.0 project differ from a traditional, preservation-oriented archive?

A. We chose the “Archive 2.0″ title in part to invoke those aspects of Web 2.0 that might prove to be useful and transformative to a digital archive: user-contributed content, shared standards for metadata to enable content sharing and transformation, etc. But we also wanted to suggest that [new technologies] represent an opportunity to rethink what an archive is and what it tries to achieve. … Preservation is one key mission, obviously. But providing access is equally important. In Archive 1.0, these two missions are often in direct conflict with one another. But in a digital archive, preservation and access might not be seen as directly opposing forces.

Soon after we used the term in the title of our project, we found other instances that had begun to emerge in the scholarly literature. The blog ArchivesNext has been a great source for us in tracking discussion of where archives may be headed within the field of archival studies and library science.

Q. You did extensive field work — interviews and beta testing, a visit to Holon and Mount Gerizim — as part of designing the project. How did that alter your thinking?

A. The feedback we received from these sessions proved invaluable. … For example, as developers we were very interested in spending a lot of our time incorporating the Samaritan script into the site design, but we found out from community members that we should focus on other tasks instead. We also learned that community members wanted us to work on incorporating the weekly Torah portion schedule into the archive, and we designed a navigation structure to highlight these points of interest.

The design concepts we garnered from our interactions with both cultural and scholarly stakeholders were very much the aim of our project. What we brought to the process of designing digital archives, in fact, was experience in user-centered methods for determining system requirements and building and refining prototypes. Applying these methods to forms of cultural work as well as to scholarly work, and seeking to balance the needs of two distinct groups of stakeholders were among the challenges that drew us, intellectually speaking, to this project.

Q. Are there ways in which cultural and scholarly uses of an archive are incompatible?

A. The potential benefits for engaging with cultural stakeholders are enormous. For example, without field research we could not have included metadata such as the Samaritan Hebrew names for their weekly Torah portions, let alone the proper English transliteration of these names. We also had conversations with the Samaritan high priest, Elazar ben Tsedaka ben Yitzhaq, about the cultural significance of the digitization effort for the community. We also received extensive feedback in our usability studies on various mock-interface designs.

Mr. Ridolfo: We think that there are ways for Archive 2.0 to represent a range of stakeholder interests. For example, our colleague Mike McLeod came up with the brilliant idea that a digital archive with a common metadata structure can have a multiplicity of interfaces tailored to the needs of each individual stakeholder group. While traditional brick-and-mortar archives have only one main entrance, Archive 2.0 has no such building constraint. In this model, we are designing the Samaritan archive with a scholarly stakeholder interface and a cultural-stakeholder interface, as well as an interface for the general public. We are excited to see what happens when members of these groups can not only access the collection in ways that suit their needs but also interact with members of the other groups to explore features that might otherwise be hidden to them.

Q. What could other Archive 2.0 projects learn from this one?

Mr. Hart-Davidson: We hope that our article will help folks reconsider archival practices and see the potential for collaboration, particularly with regard to Archive 2.0 fieldwork. When an archive becomes a digital resource, it not only means that users can access it from all over the world. It also means that an archive transforms to become a place where interaction among stakeholder groups can take place. In many respects, this is quite different from a traditional archive, which is often characterized by tight control over the ways users can interact with artifacts and, perhaps less deliberately, with one another. Hushed conversations and gloved hands are no longer required in digital spaces.

Q. Are traditional brick-and-mortar archives doomed?

A. Not at all. Traditional brick-and-mortar archives are not replaceable. They will continue to serve important functions related to the preservation and restoration of physical artifacts in particular. But we do think archival institutions have an ethical imperative to provide the kind of Archive 2.0 support that we received. … With the tension between preservation and access reduced, archival institutions must reconsider the terms of the trust agreements — tacit or explicit — they have with cultural stakeholders and do what is required to honor these while, at the same time, ensuring that access for scholarly stakeholders is maintained. If they do not, archival institutions run the risk of working increasingly at odds with their most important values: preserving artifacts at the expense of culture, all in the name of preserving culture!

Full disclosure: I would not be making this series without the excellent example of MSU PhD Student Donnie Sackey, who is currently in the middle of a highly comprehensive rhetoric/web comic and forthcoming book project.

Episode 1: Worrying about the the press release…
Part 2:

This project explores the benefits and challenges of pursuing a community-centered design approach for digital archives, a process we term an “archive 2.0″ model of development. Our team aimed to create a new online archive which would include select pages from three fifteenth-century Samaritan Pentateuchs. As the name “archive 2.0″ implies, we embrace both the technologies and the expanded possibilities for user participation associated with Web 2.0. More than simply adding the technological affordances of Web 2.0 to a traditional archive, however, our project uses these technological capabalities as a heuristic for reconsidering the very nature of an archive, both what it is and what it does. Unlike many existing digital, scholarly archive projects aimed at an audience of other archivists, from the very beginning our project has focused on engaging with the cultural and scholarly stakeholders associated with a particular collection of texts and artifacts….read the rest here!

Priestly blessing over a 14th century Samaritan Pentateuch, Mt. Gerizim

The next day (Monday, May 25) we had a series of meetings with many members of the community. The beginning of the day was spent touring the Samaritan village, including their school and their museum, where we we gained some insight into how Samaritan children acquire their literacies and the extent to which ancient texts form a core part of Samaritan identity. We were taken on a tour of several Samaritan holy sites, including their pilgrimage trail inside the remains of an ancient Byzantine fort. We met with their religious leader, the Samaritan High Priest Elazar ben Tsedaka ben Yitzhaq, who gave us significant insight into the community’s drive to preserve their sacred texts as well as a tour of his personal library. From there we were graciously invited into several community members homes, where we were able to discuss their family histories and how their texts are passed down from one generation to the next. We gained important insight into not only how their personally-held ancient manuscripts (many of which are older than anything in the MSU collection) continue to be used in rituals, but also how those texts are stored and maintained and how they are passed from one generation to the next.

Our work with the community will continue later today (Tuesday, May 26) when we will conduct formal interviews with several members of the community in Holon. We have been moved by the hospitality of the Samaritan community. They have opened up their homes to us and we are grateful for their continued support.

For photos of our trip, view Jim’s Flickr collection, Mike’s Facebook albums (group one and group two), and follow our Twitter stream.