Sacred Trash

by Adina Hoffman

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  Some of the scraps dumped out in the Ben Ezra courtyard would wind up in the hands of people with a deeper and more immediate understanding than Cyrus Adler of their true origin and worth. Born in 1866 in Slovakia, the Jerusalem rabbi and independent scholar Shelomo Aharon Wertheimer, for instance, supported his large, poor family by buying and selling manuscripts. In the overgrown village that was 1890s Jerusalem, the young Wertheimer was known around town as an expert bibliophile, and so he received frequent visits from other dealers and suppliers who brought him manuscripts for inspection and possible purchase. One of these was a so-called emissary, referred to by Wertheimer’s latter-day descendants simply as “the Yemenite,” a man whom Wertheimer had dispatched to Egypt to buy manuscripts on his behalf. The Yemenite seems to have made several trips, returning with fragments that Wertheimer then set out to sell to the librarians at Cambridge and Oxford, to whom he announced in a series of letters and postcards—written mostly in English, but sometimes in German or (to Schechter) in Hebrew—that they came from “one of the Genizas of old Egypt.”

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  Wertheimer’s English in these missives was flawed but expressive (he addresses one note to “The Magnificent University Library”), his tone polite yet urgent—though this seems to have been more a function of financial need than any compulsion to convince his European customers of the importance of the manuscript’s source. “I also come to let you know,” he wrote, “that an Ancient ‘Sefer-Tora’ found in one of the ‘Geniza’ [sic] of Cairo (Egypt) written on leather of Roebuck ‘’ should you require, let me know soon.” In fact, given the monumental nature of the discovery he was more or less announcing to two of the world’s great libraries, it is striking that much of the correspondence preserved in the archives consists of wrangling about postal rates: “Is it right that I should pay when your good & kind self promised me that you will send it by Registered post direct to me without my paying anything?” From 1894 to 1896 Wertheimer sold 62 Geniza manuscripts to Cambridge and some 239 items to Oxford, though just as much of the material he offered was probably sent back as was kept. One list preserved in the Cambridge files shows the piddling sums Wertheimer received for various manuscripts, of which at least some, it seems plain now, came from the Geniza; others in the same batch were marked by the librarian (whose diary indicates that he consulted with Schechter about these possible acquisitions) “not wanted,” “not wanted at all,” or simply “worthless.”

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  But the contribution Wertheimer made to the gradual uncovering of the Geniza went beyond mere sales: he was the very first to knowingly transcribe and publish texts from the Geniza, and though later scholars would refer a bit dismissively to this work as “somewhat unscientific,” he was, we might say, the founding father of Geniza studies. As significantly, he was also the first to make explicit mention in a publication of the existence of the trove. In an important 1893 Hebrew book of hitherto little-known rabbinical commentaries, he made conscious reference to the source of the manuscript with which he was working: it “comes from the old Geniza … in the land of Egypt,” he announced, and he would go on to publish other volumes filled with a rich range of material from the Geniza—including more unknown midrash, rabbinic responsa, and liturgical poems. The wide scope of Geniza documents he put up for sale to Cambridge—everything from Judeo-Spanish poetry collections to marriage contracts to legal deeds to the seventh-century Apocalypse of Zerubbabel to medical tracts to letters to Passover hymns—also indicates a keen understanding of the vast and eclectic potential of the cache.

  Yet decades later he would look back with more than a little bitterness at the fact that his own role in the recovery of the Geniza had been occluded. “It was I who made known to the world the importance of this Geniza, and other scholars and students came after me and,” he complained, rather biblically, “despoiled Egypt of the Geniza manuscripts and brought to light many things from among them and earned fame throughout the world for themselves—and no one remembers the poor man who delivered the city.”

  Wertheimer’s own close brush was, he clearly felt, with bibliographic immortality. In this sense, he was not alone. The final countdown to Schechter’s “discovery” was marked by the melancholy presence of several such aggrieved and almost-famous men—now nearly forgotten.

  One of the most painful of the close brushes that make up the early story of the Geniza is that of Adolf Neubauer, an extremely learned, slightly bitten Hungarian Jewish scholar and bibliographer who was Solomon Schechter’s sometimes friend but more often rival, and the man who probably came nearer than anyone else to beating Schechter—and Cambridge—in the race to pack up and haul off the bulk of the Geniza documents.

  Some sixteen years Schechter’s senior, the multilingual Neubauer had studied in Prague and Paris and immersed himself for years in the exacting analysis and publication of various Hebrew manuscripts. In 1868, he was hired by the Bodleian Library to catalog their extensive Hebrew holdings, and was eventually appointed sub-librarian of the entire collection. Later named that university’s Reader in Rabbinics, he was Schechter’s Oxford counterpart, if not in social at least in professional terms—and for several years these two erudite émigré scholars, among the only Jews in their respective Oxbridge settings, shared a wary bond, based on their common Central European background and, more important, on their passion for Hebrew manuscripts.

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  Their friendship was far from simple, and their personalities were quite distinct. Never one to mince words, Mathilde Schechter gently mocks in an unpublished memoir the lifelong bachelor Neubauer’s severe stinginess, though she does allow that he had his winning qualities too. He had been very handsome once, “with his small features and fine blue eyes.” And when she and Schechter came to know him, “in spite of [his] twenty-seven year [old] coat he always looked scrupulously clean and well-groomed, and he had a great deal of dignity.… [W]e really were fond of him, although it was trying sometimes.”

  That fondness aside, her portrait—written years later, after the friendship had completely withered—stings. (“He always had the idea that every woman he met was in love with him, and that he was irresistible,” she notes, without comment.) She describes how she and Schechter found Neubauer once in his Oxford house reading manuscripts late at night beside “one little tallow candle,” which was the only light in the house. Whenever Neubauer got a new manuscript he’d invite Schechter to come see it, and Mathilde would send her husband “laden with good things to eat, partly in order to observe the dietary laws and partly because I knew he would not have enough food at Neubauer’s.” She goes on: “Whenever I came [to Oxford] with Schechter, we stayed at lodgings, but being very polite to ladies he [Neubauer] insisted upon my coming to lunch with Schechter, where he served the cheapest fish obtainable. He was very proud of his coffee, which he made himself, and which was indeed excellent. Somebody once sent him some very good cheese, and when I asked for a second helping he put the dish far away at the other side of the table and assured me that it was not healthy for me.”

  Neubauer had, in certain respects, a head start where the Geniza was concerned: as early as 1876 he had been sent by the Bodleian to St. Petersburg, to report back on the Firkovitch collection. In the description he offered upon his return, he explained the idea of a geniza, and made it clear how important he thought this particular Karaite “collection of … manuscript débris,” concluding his remarks with the startling (for its time) suggestion: “May I be allowed to draw the attention of the University to the treasures which Rabbanite synagogues might offer from their numerous ‘Genizoth’ in the East?”

  While it seems Neubauer didn’t immediately grasp the true worth of the Geniza manuscripts offered for sale by Reverend Chester and Rabbi Wertheimer, he did at least have the foresight to acquire some of these for the library. And it does appear that their value began gradually to dawn on him, as i
t was later recounted that in the early nineties a certain professor “used to see the desk of Dr Neubauer … covered with portions of books which Dr Neubauer told him had come from the East, his professional discretion not permitting him to disclose their exact source.”

  By 1894, though, Neubauer had actually announced in print the existence of a certain Egyptian geniza. Perhaps it was a way of marking Oxford’s turf, but in a scholarly article from that year, he declared that “the Bodleian Library has lately acquired a considerable number of fragments of Hebrew MSS., found in a Genizah at Cairo, which contain a great deal of unknown matter in the branch of post-biblical literature.” And in the next issue of the same journal, he again proclaimed, “The collection of Hebrew and Arabic fragments coming from a Genizah in Egypt, and lately acquired by the Bodleian Library, rivals that of St. Petersburg, if not in quantity, certainly in quality.”

  Even as Neubauer was making public the fact of a geniza, he was also plotting behind the scenes to try to get more of the stash for Oxford. Meanwhile, the situation back in Cairo had shifted. In 1892 the new synagogue building had gone up—“a hideous square abomination” in the ornery estimation of Greville Chester—and many of the manuscripts lying out in the courtyard had apparently been returned to the new structure’s room, built, it was said, according to the original floor plan, but now made accessible by a ladder placed in the women’s section. Other manuscripts from the Geniza were then buried around the synagogue grounds—a practice that, it seems, had been going on for some time before the “renovation.” (So goes one plausible account. In fact, it is notable that after more than a century of research into Ben Ezra, no one has yet managed to account definitively for just what took place during the synagogue “renovations.” Was the original Geniza destroyed and reconstructed completely, and then—bizarrely—refilled, or did it somehow remain standing while the rest of the building was razed and re-created? There are no clear answers.)

  The idea that valuable Hebrew parchments and papers might also lie underground added a new archaeological dimension to the quest for Hebrew manuscripts. In 1889—not coincidentally, near the start of a decade in which recently excavated Greek papyri flooded the Middle Eastern market—the Egypt Exploration Fund uncovered several such fragments in the mounds around Fustat, and these Hebrew manuscripts eventually made their way to the Bodleian. Though they were donated by the Fund to the library, the man responsible for salvaging them was a mysterious figure known as the Count Riamo d’Hulst, who claimed to have been a subject of “the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg” but who may have been a deserting German officer from the Franco-Prussian War. As an employee of the Fund, d’Hulst had been digging near the synagogue when he’d come across the fragments, which he shipped back to England together with several Kufic tombstones, some pottery, coins, and glass pieces. He was later encouraged by the Bodleian to oversee a much more extensive dig at the site, and the fruits of his excavations would, in Neubauer’s words, “form the nucleus of our large collection of Egyptian fragments.”

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  D’Hulst’s story is, though, yet another sad Geniza tale—as his critical contribution to the trove’s retrieval was, for years, kept hidden. (He was also barely paid for his work.) According to Nicholson, the Bodleian librarian, “absolute secrecy as to the Cairo fragments was, for the time being, necessary to the interests of the Library.” While this excuse might sound reasonable, it was offered grudgingly, and only after d’Hulst had taken to writing lengthy (sixteen-to-twenty-page) screeds in which he hounded the Oxford authorities, declaiming, for instance, “For me, it [the omission of his name in connection to the finds] is not a question of mere vanity but of justice, and having been repeatedly treated unjustly it has become a question of principle.” And elsewhere, more wrenchingly: “you have not to look back as I have upon a life ruined and embittered by ingratitude & disgraceful behaviour in return for services rendered.” A “pronounced Anglophile,” in his own terms, he was imprisoned in Egypt during World War I as an enemy alien, and soon after died of malaria, impoverished and unknown. The full extent of his role in retrieving Geniza manuscripts was only uncovered in 2008 by a tenacious young Cambridge scholar.

  It wasn’t, though, just the buried fragments that were now being excavated: the entire Geniza was, in a sense, up for grabs. In an 1895 letter to Neubauer, the Assyriologist, collector, and regular traveler to Egypt A. H. Sayce (who had, through d’Hulst, been steadily supplying Oxford with Geniza manuscripts) claimed that “the Jews in charge of the place have offered to sell the whole collection for £50 with £5 bakshish [the equivalent of some $5,000 in today’s currency]. But the difficulty is how to get such a large quantity of things out of the country. Could the Bodleian get the government or rather Lord Cromer [the British consul general of Egypt] to do it?” There were other obstacles too. “The three heads of the community are selling [the manuscripts],” wrote Sayce to Neubauer in a letter a few days later, “but as the one with whom the bargain was made is perpetually drunk it has been very difficult to get it completed.”

  For whatever reason, the plans for this sale fell through—and soon afterward, in early January of 1896, Elkan Adler returned to Cairo, where, after making a probably ample “donation,” he was, as he later wrote, “conducted by [Cairo Chief] Rabbi Rafail [ben Shimon] to the extreme end of the ladies’ gallery, permitted to climb to the topmost rung of a ladder, to enter the secret chamber of the Genizah through a hole in the wall, and to take away with me a sackful of paper and parchment writing—as much in fact as I could gather up in the three or four hours I was permitted to linger there.”

  Upon his return to England, Adler announced his discovery to Neubauer and Schechter. “The first rated me soundly for not carrying the whole lot away, the second admired my continence but was not foolish enough to follow my example.”

  Or, as he put it elsewhere, “Neubauer was very angry with me for not ransacking the whole Genizah. I told him that my conscience, which was tenderer then than now, reproached me for having taken away what I did, but he said that science knows no law.”

  Those were fighting words for such a proper gentleman. Neubauer must have felt himself a bit frenzied as he drew closer and closer to the Geniza stash: he had acquired a valuable, if small, trove of manuscripts already, and it was just a matter of time before he would somehow seize hold of the whole thing for the Bodleian. This may not have been a matter of purely “scientific” interest; he was, according to Mathilde Schechter, “of a very jealous nature” and seems not to have taken kindly to the momentous May 1896 announcement that Cambridge’s own Dr. Schechter had discovered a leaf of the long-lost Hebrew Book of Ben Sira. Never mind that Neubauer had plenty of other scholarly fish to fry and that he had, until now, evinced only a passing interest in the apocryphal book: word of Schechter’s find seems to have driven him around the competitive bend. Schechter, for his part, was brimming with excitement and, immediately upon identifying the ancient scrap in Agnes and Margaret’s dining room that spring day, had dashed off a postcard to his difficult friend to tell him the thrilling news. After two weeks of pregnant silence, Schechter received a letter from Neubauer saying that the postcard was illegible. At the same time, Neubauer let it be known that he and his younger Oxford colleague A. E. Cowley just happened to have discovered nine leaves of Ben Sira in the Oxford collection! (“It is natural for us to think,” mused Agnes Lewis, “that [the notice of Schechter’s find] was of some assistance in guiding Messrs. Neubauer and Cowley to this important result.”) Mathilde was more direct and declared that “for a long time he [Neubauer] could not forgive Dr. Schechter. He was very bitter about many things.” That was the end of the friendship.

  Now the race to get the Geniza was really on, and in October of 1896, Sayce wrote to d’Hulst: “I have persuaded the University to send Dr. Neubauer out to Cairo, since being a Jew he may be better able to get the MSS from the Jews than we are.” Rumors were afoot that Elkan Adler had been in Cairo and
had purchased certain manuscripts, and Sayce was eager to beat him to the rest.

  But as we have heard, Neubauer already knew about Adler’s Geniza finds, and though he had earlier berated the London lawyer for “not carrying the whole lot away,” Neubauer now turned rather abruptly on his heel, declared Adler’s fragments “a lot of worthless rubbish,” and decided not to make the trip.

  Was he too weary to go? Too cheap? (Adler had, it seems, committed a cardinal sin in Neubauer’s eyes and “paid high prices” for his haul of useless trash.) Did he prefer to stay home and rummage for other Ben Sira fragments in the Bodleian collection? Or did he consider the ripped and dirty jumble of unsorted odds and ends that Adler had showed him—and the others that Sayce and d’Hulst had recently boxed up and shipped to the Bodleian—somehow beneath Oxford, which had long prided itself on obtaining valuable literary manuscripts in excellent condition, preferably more complete quires, in fine scribal hands? We may never really know—though one thing at least is sure: with that small but fateful failure of the imagination, the learned, lonely Adolf Neubauer lost all claims to the Geniza stash and, in this respect, to posterity.

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  All Sirach Now

  Why Ben Sira? What drew Schechter into the spell of those fragments that May afternoon in the Giblews’ dining room? What notions were kindling the glitter in his eyes that Margaret had seen when Schechter asked if he might take the leaf of Ben Sira home for inspection? His own pronouncements about the find never confront the question of motivation, at least not directly, and so in following out this psychic thread we are, to an unnerving extent, searching among shadows. Only in that half-light, however, do we stand a chance of discovering what it was about the seventeen “badly mutilated” lines of verse from the second century B.C.E. that roused the Romanian scholar and caused him to orchestrate, on the sly, his Indiana Jones–like expedition to Egypt.