Sacred Trash

by Adina Hoffman

  But perhaps the discomfort here springs from something more substantial than just Schechter’s testy tone and his reluctance to tip. It has, too, to do with the question of his attitude toward the Geniza cache and its ownership. As the sacks of fragments piled up (at the start of what he called “the goyish new year,” January 1, 1897, he had laid claim to three satchels, by the next week nine, then thirteen, seventeen, and by January 20 “about thirty bags of fragments”), Schechter had clearly come to feel the manuscripts were his own private property. “Thieves,” he claimed, were trying to sell back to him “things they stole from me.” The beadle himself was “stealing many good things and sell[ing] them to dealers in antiquities.” One particular dealer had “some mysterious relations with the Genizah, which enabled him to offer me a fair number of fragments for sale. My complaints to the authorities of the Jewish community brought this plundering to a speedy end, but not before I had parted with certain guineas by way of payment to this worthy for a number of selected fragments, which were mine by right and on which he put exorbitant prices.”

  “Mine by right.” That Schechter had the prescience to realize the Geniza’s value rested in its integrity is not in doubt. If anything, it makes him a visionary and a hero. (The collection would be, he was wise to grasp, next to worthless were it picked apart and sold off by various profiteers; had he not arrived on the scene when he did, this would likely have happened.) Nor is there any question that the grand rabbi of Cairo himself had given Schechter carte blanche to gather up all he wanted of the Geniza. To judge from the tremendous welcome Schechter received from the city’s Jewish aristocracy, his mission also enjoyed their wholehearted approval. The Cattauis, Mosseris, and other wealthy Jewish families of the place seem to have been much more interested in cultivating the goodwill of the British authorities and in establishing close relations with an elite European institution like Cambridge than in mucking around in what they must have perceived as nothing more than filthy clutter. Though the Cattauis had Egyptian roots that may have stretched back some seven or eight hundred years, many of the other leading families were relatively recent arrivals to the country, having immigrated over the course of the last few centuries from Italy and elsewhere in the Levant; it seems likely that they felt no strong connection to the longer history of the local community. Neither did any of them live in Fustat, which was by this time a slum. Still, Schechter’s assertion—“mine by right”—seems a rather presumptuous one for a Romanian-born wanderer-rabbi and naturalized citizen of England to have made after spending just a few weeks in Egypt.

  To be fair, Schechter’s proprietary attitude toward the Geniza fragments extended well beyond the borders of Egypt—and may have had as much to do with scholarly territorialism as it did with the assertion of colonial privilege. In a January 12 letter (marked “private”) to the mild-mannered Cambridge librarian Francis Jenkinson, Schechter outlined his work in Cairo, describing the dust and bugs and aggravating interactions with the beadle, as well as the thirteen sacks of fragments he had collected to date, then moving on to a “great request” he wished to make of Jenkinson. Schechter was “anxious to send the first lot home to England” and wanted to know if Jenkinson would be willing to “give them a place in the University Library till I return.” The emphatic underlinings are all Schechter’s own:

  The MSS will probably belong soon to your library. I want only to hear first whether you and the syndics will agree to certain conditions which I have to make. Money plays no important part in these conditions and I am sure you will find them very fair and just. But till then I want the MSS to be considered as my private property; so that the boxes must not be opened before I have returned. For I am very anxious to [be] the first to examine them properly. If you cannot agree to these condition [SIC] will you do me the favour to send at once—when the boxes arrive for Mrs Schechter (2 Rock Road) and hand her over the boxes, who will bring them into some place of safety till I return P[lease].G[od].

  While he was waiting for Jenkinson’s answer, a somewhat skittish Schechter announced to Mathilde that “I do not think it is safe to keep here all my fragments” as “there is such a thing as an evil eye of certain people.” He believed it best to set about arranging for an export permit so that the manuscripts could be shipped off sooner rather than later.

  Meanwhile, he found time to spend a day examining what he called “the second Genizah,” which was in the “cemetery”—apparently the Basatin—and to unearth certain fragments there. (It is hard to say what, precisely, Schechter took from the graveyard or other local synagogue storerooms; he occasionally refers in his letters to the “Genizas,” plural, and though he says he “found almost nothing” in “the other Geniza”—which geniza is not specified—his final count of manuscripts includes what he described as “one and a half sacks from the other Genizas.”) He toured the Coptic churches of Old Cairo with some English friends; prayed in the Karaite synagogue; received a visit from the first secretary to Lord Cromer; took a drive with Cattaui; stopped in at the English embassy; and ate several Sabbath dinners with the rabbi who “kisses me every minute (which is not very pleasant).” He also befriended, among others, a Jewish waiter at his hotel—who supplied him daily with a little piece of grilled kosher meat—and a British businessman, Reginald Henriques, who lived in Cairo and wound up acting as a kind of private manuscript scout after Schechter left Egypt, writing in 1898 to announce that “I have been having most exciting times lately in your Geniza.” He had, he reported, intercepted the excavations that Count d’Hulst and “some twenty Arabs” were carrying out in the Ben Ezra courtyard. Henriques eventually sent to Cambridge several shipments of these newly unearthed fragments, which “but for my timely intervention … would now have been carried off to the Bodleian Library.”

  On the whole, Schechter found Cairo “a glorious place, enjoying an Italian opera, French dancing masters, English administration, and Mohammetan huris. The last are very ugly, and I do not wonder they are so careful to cover their faces.” Schechter had, it seems, made a splash in fashionable circles. A rich Jewish acquaintance told him that “there is much talk in the Turf (English) Club about the great Jewish Savant etc. etc.” And toward the end of his stay he finally met the consul general, Lord Cromer, “who was exceedingly kind. He expressed the wish that I should be presented to him.” The fact that the most powerful man in Egypt was so intrigued by Schechter was more than flattering: it was useful. The customs officials had the right to confiscate all antiquities marked for export, but the British authorities—working, it seems, on Cromer’s orders—were quick to arrange all the papers Schechter needed to make his removal of the Geniza’s contents legal.

  For all his hobnobbing Schechter missed his family deeply: “Could you manage,” he wrote Mathilde early on, “to have yourself and the children photographed and surprise me with it[?]” Later, his pangs grew more acute: “I sympathize with Baby [possibly their younger daughter, Amy]. I also feel homesick and cry sometimes in the night. I want my wife and children.” Especially his wife, it seems, to whom he proclaimed a few weeks before he returned home, “never again on a Journey without you. I cannot stand it any longer.”

  (Photo Credit 4.6)

  They were no substitute for his Liebe Mathilde, but when Agnes and Margaret arrived in Cairo on January 20, he was very happy to see them. The original plan had been for them to travel with him in the first place, but Agnes’s severe arthritis detained them; she joked that her rheumatism had flared up when she’d inhaled “the microbe of Ecclesiasticus, a creature that may have come into existence in the ninth century, and fattened on the very dirty paper whereon [the fragment they’d shown Schechter] was written.” They did eventually set out, bound again for Sinai, but eager to stop in the Egyptian capital. “Our movements were greatly stimulated,” as Agnes put it, “by the news of Dr. Schechter’s having obtained access to the Genizah synagogue and having dived into a hole filled with Hebrew fragments.” Besides familiar faces,
they came bearing gifts from home: quinine, a magnifying glass, and—best of all—a respirator, which the good doctor Donald MacAlister had thought to send along to help Schechter breathe while inside the Geniza. (“An inspiration” Schechter dubbed “this saving thing.”) Agnes reported in immediately to Mathilde about “your dear Husband” and described how “Mr. Schechter is rather tired of and tired with the work he has been at. He has found a few good things amongst heaps of, well, I won’t say rubbish but unimportant stuff. This is the way in all Eastern libraries. But in this case he has been choked with dust and bad air and has worked like a horse.… Mr. Schechter was disappointed that we had not brought ‘Tommy’ [the 1896 novel Sentimental Tommy by the Scotsman and Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie, about a young man with an overactive imagination; Mathilde promptly sent him a copy] but we are going to lend him Robert Louis Stevenson’s last book, ‘Weir of Hermiston’ to make up for it. And really he has enough to see and study in Cairo without distracting his mind with novels.”

  The twins meant, as usual, to do more than socialize when they were in Cairo. They had come to work, and a few days after their arrival, Schechter took them to see the Geniza. Agnes’s aching joints kept her from ascending that “roughest of rude ladders,” which led to the room, but both Margaret and one Miss de Witt, a student from Girton (Cambridge’s first college for women) who had accompanied them on their journey, climbed up and peered in. Much to Agnes’s regret, they had forgotten their small Frena camera back in the hotel. Had they brought it along, we might have some visual record of the “heterogeneous mass of confusion … [that] filled the loft of the Genizah.” As it is, only such verbal portraits remain: there is no photograph of the Geniza before its contents were carted away.

  Agnes and Margaret understood that they could best help Schechter by visiting the various antiquities shops around town and buying whatever fragments they found there. (Margaret would later describe how they returned to the same neighborhood and shops where they had been regular customers for several years and had bought the original Ben Sira page. “We have no doubt whatever … that these … had come from this Genizah without the cognizance of the Grand Rabbi.” It seems Mrs. Lewis’s original announcement that the Ben Sira scrap had come from Palestine had been meant to throw the academic competition off the scent.) They also bought a leather portmanteau in which to pack these purchases, and, “as there is no particular satisfaction in importing dirt,” set about cleaning the manuscripts in their hotel room. Agnes performed this task with what she described as “great eagerness,” since “every scrap that I detached from its neighbours might possibly have been concealing another leaf of the Hebrew Ecclesiasticus, but in this I was disappointed. They were so wet that I had to spread them out on trunks and tables in the sunlight to dry, removing a quantity of sticky treacle-like stuff with bits of paper which I afterwards destroyed.”

  Schechter, meanwhile, was grateful for their company (“They are very friendly and in no way intrusive,” he wrote Mathilde) if a bit skeptical about the results of their shopping trips. (“I think that they have bought the things which I have declined to buy from the dealers, for I have only bought what seemed to me important.” That said, once back home he did arrange to buy several sacks of fragments from a dealer named Raffalovich, who shipped them to Cambridge, where—after a session of sorting with Schechter—Jenkinson declared the contents “very poor stuff.”) And he continued to work—tussling with the beadle till the very end about how deep to dig in the heap of paper and vellum—and on January 28, he announced that he had “finally finished the big Geniza. I have emptied all.” By the last day of the month “about a hundred thousand” fragments had been packed into “8 big wooden cases” and were ready to be shipped. (In fact more recent counts show the tally closer to 190,000 pieces.) He was, he told Mathilde, “anxious that they would go away from here for in the last days some began to grumble that I take away so much etc.”

  He planned to wait another week or so before setting out to visit his brother in Palestine. Even though the Geniza crates had already been sent off to England, he wanted, he wrote, to stay in town to keep an eye on “the thieves” to see whether they “will throw on the market things they stole from me.” In the meantime, he invited Agnes and Margaret to tea to meet the rabbi, had another meal with the Cattauis (who packed him a kosher basket to take on his trip), and ate dinner again with the rabbi, “with the usual consequence of indigestion.” But for all his sarcasm, Schechter still knew enough to be extremely grateful: “These people are so kind that they are worth some inconvenience.”

  5

  * * *

  Sorting

  Clouds and sun, with a westerly wind, were recorded neatly in Francis Jenkinson’s diary on May 11, 1897, as was the “squall of rain & hail” that burst out in Cambridge that evening. On this particular Tuesday, the meteorologically hypersensitive and headache-prone university librarian—a devoted amateur botanist, entomologist, bird-watcher, and chamber music enthusiast—also noted the peppermint geranium he’d given a friend, mentioned the recovery from influenza of a well-known literary critic he’d happened to meet on his way to work, and, without veering from the same even script and tone, reported: “Began unpacking the first box of Hebrew fragm[en]ts, most anxious stuff.”

  Most anxious indeed. Although Jenkinson remains tactfully closemouthed in his journal about the particulars of what went on that afternoon—noting simply: “Hurried lunch & back by 2.0: Schechter, Ma[ste]r of St. John’s [Charles Taylor], Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson set to work at the fragments in Centre First Floor Room”—it is not hard to imagine the tense scene that must have unfolded as, under the supervision of the gentle and fastidious librarian, the first crate of Geniza documents was pried open, and the excitable Solomon Schechter plunged his hands into the heaps of dirty fragments.

  Schechter had been eagerly anticipating this moment for months now. He had returned from the Middle East at the end of March, traveling home on the boat from Port Said with none other than the leading English Egyptologist of the day, Flinders Petrie, who—while Schechter was busy emptying the Geniza—had examined the site of the Ptolemaic and Roman-era town of Oxyrynchus, 120 miles south of Cairo; that very same month enormous trash heaps had been discovered there that bore an uncanny resemblance to the Geniza and yielded a trove of Greek papyrus rolls: a thousand years’ worth of tax documents, census records, letters, contracts, receipts, as well as a forgotten poem by Sappho, three unknown sayings attributed to Jesus, and a long-lost comedy by Menander. Hellenic Egypt wasn’t Petrie’s purview, however, so he’d left that dig in the hands of two young Oxford archaeologists (who would spend the rest of their lives unearthing and analyzing their finds—some five hundred thousand pieces in all) and set off to investigate the Old Kingdom rock tombs at Deshasheh.

  He and Schechter were already friends—Mathilde mentions in her memoir that while Schechter was staying in Cairo he had visited Petrie in the desert and “found him working in his night-shirt”—and these two bearded and charismatic pioneers in their respective fields enjoyed their time together on the steamer. One wonders if they discussed the Geniza-Oxyrynchus connection and Petrie’s belief in the archaeological importance of “unconsidered trifles” for the reconstruction of history: “bits of boxes, string, thread, sandals and … even linen.” (The Geniza was spilling with its own such textual “trifles.”) Then, near Marseilles, their boat hit a rock and almost sank. Petrie predicted they’d be underwater in no more than ten minutes, when a passing ship stopped and managed to take everyone on board, thereby rescuing Schechter and Petrie, and with them, in part, the very future of Egypt’s past.

  This near shipwreck was not, as it happens, the only threat to Schechter’s health. His month of work in the Geniza had taken a real physical toll, and while still in Cairo and complaining of how the “dust of centuries [had] nearly suffocated and blinded” him, he had already undergone medical treatment. As soon as he returned home, he fell more serio
usly ill and his doctor ordered him to travel south for a rest cure—and to distance himself from all manuscripts and books. (Schechter being Schechter, that was a futile bit of advice; even as he was ailing, he happily reported to a friend that he’d discovered an eleventh-century Geniza letter stuffed in his very own pocket.) His good friend James Frazer offered to pay the expenses for such a therapeutic trip, but in the end Schechter chose to convalesce in Cambridge. He did gradually recover, though he would never quite return to his former strength. According to his biographer, “he passed in a year or two from robust vigor to the appearance of an old man.”

  Still, by the late spring afternoon when the first crate of fragments was finally opened, Schechter was well enough and ready, as he put it, to “wade … through these mountains of paper and parchment.” At the end of May, Charles Taylor offered, in his own name and Schechter’s, the “Cairo MSS brought to England by Mr. Schechter to the University, in due time, on certain conditions,” chief among which was that Schechter be granted permission to borrow whatever he wanted. It took another year for the particulars of this gift to be ironed out, but eventually the library syndics agreed to the terms, which included the proviso that it be designated “a separate collection, to be called by some such name as the Taylor-Schechter Collection from the Genizah of Old Cairo.” The university would, meanwhile, make arrangements for the binding or mounting of the fragments, and designate £500 “for the purpose of obtaining expert assistance in classifying and making a catalogue of the collection.” The task would, it was reckoned, take ten years.

  Three quarters of a century later the fragments were still being sorted.