Even-keeled university decrees were one thing. The actual process of sorting the fragments was another—and the first few days of Schechter’s work were especially turbulent, with Jenkinson reporting to his diary, “When I got to the Library, I found Schechter had been making a row & declaring someone had cut one of his fragments—(it had been folded & then snipped so as to leave diamond-shaped holes). Luckily I had noticed it before, & had in fact myself put it on his table; so I was able to give him a good setting down for his impertinence and violence.”
Schechter was combustible by nature. He was also, it seems, nervous about the prospect of ceding any control over “his” fragments, which explains why it was that the very same day that Jenkinson recorded Schechter’s tantrum, Agnes Lewis wrote the librarian a letter in which she explained that she had “fully intended coming again this afternoon and giving what little service I could to Mr. Schechter in the way of cleaning his fragments without trying to identify any of them.” But then she had happened to meet Mrs. Schechter, who explained that “her husband is quite able to clean and arrange them himself, after he has ascertained what they are. So I think I had better not trouble them again without a further invitation to do so, especially as I have more than enough at home to occupy myself with.” Agnes was, on the one hand, minding her manners, and clearly sensed that Schechter viewed her presence as an annoyance. On the other hand, she of all people could understand what it meant to feel protective of one’s manuscripts. Besides, all this talk of cleaning and straightening the fragments may have been missing the point. Perhaps—she seemed also to be saying—it was best to let Schechter manhandle the documents in whatever way he saw fit. As she explained to Jenkinson: “I admire and respect Mr. Schechter for things that are quite apart from neatness and tidiness.”
Such tensions, together with Schechter’s somewhat eccentric work habits, may have been what led to the decision to set aside a special room where he could sort the fragments in peace. (It may also have had something to do with their stench.) And so it was that Schechter would daily repair to “the Cairo apartment”—as it was sometimes called—
with a big dust-coat and nose-and-mouth protector, working steadily for many hours at a time, although the odor of the mss. which had lain buried for so many centuries was so overwhelming that visitors could hardly stand it more than a few minutes. He had around him a great many grocery-boxes, labeled “Philosophy,” “Rabbinics,” “Theology,” “Literature,” “History,” “Bible,” “Talmud,” etc. and with his magnifying glasses he would study each little ragged piece, and then put it into its proper box with so much alertness that it was almost like a housewife counting different articles of laundry.
Or, as another Cambridge memoirist more succinctly put it: “No one who saw him in his nose-bag among the debris is likely to forget it.”
Throughout that first summer in particular, Schechter toiled obsessively at sorting the fragments, and as he did, he found a sympathetic ally in Francis Jenkinson, who provided both practical help and psychological support. For all their cultural and stylistic differences, the portly rabbi and the gaunt curate’s son were—yang and yin—joined by that very alertness that Mathilde describes. After Jenkinson’s death, a friend remembered his “curious bird-like movement[s]” and another recalled that he’d had a face “from which all color was absent … like parchment, lined and wrinkled.” His late-Victorian, pressed-flower delicacy notwithstanding, Jenkinson was keenly alive to the natural world: he had, it was said, “hawk-like vision,” and his diaries provide an extraordinary record of a sensibility attuned in almost microscopic fashion to the toads, verbena, phlox, caterpillars, and sycamore in his garden, as well as to the “occasional smoked glass sun,” the “watery moon,” and shooting stars above him. His ear, too, was finely calibrated, and he noted with a similar sharpness the sounds of the different birds: “Swifts screaming in a pack of 50 or so as late as 9 p.m.” and, on another evening, “Coming home heard ‘kŭ-kŭ-kŭk’ over Sheep’s Green or thereabouts.” A friend from his days as a student offered this moving portrait of the librarian as a young man: “I shall never forget how, one night in the Great Court of Trinity, he stopped our (probably flippant) conversation with his finger on his lip; some of us, I have no doubt, thought he was reproving the style of our talk and indeed, one will never forget occasions where some quiet reproof or look of disapproval made one determine never to utter unseemly words in his presence again. This time, he was not chiding us, but trying to get us to listen to a sound he could hear though most of us could not, a flight of wild geese passing far above our heads.”
(Photo Credit 5.1)
It is not too much of a stretch to say that Schechter, for his part, was just as fiercely focused on the once-living world of his written scraps. And as he worked his way through those stinking heaps of shemot, he seems to have felt it his duty to resuscitate or even resurrect the fragments, so in a way bringing the process of geniza full circle. Relations between the two men were at times wobbly: Jenkinson admitted at one point to his diary that he had had “much too much” of Schechter at the library, and on another occasion reported that Schechter “has upset a large box of fragments in the darkest part of the room close to the pipes.” This distressed Schechter, and he begged the librarian to gather up and protect the pieces he’d spilled: “Meanwhile,” wrote Jenkinson “he tramples them like so much litter.” But despite occasional friction, they seem to have shared a desire—almost a compulsive need—to pay the most careful attention to the identification of animate, or metaphorically animate, things, whether moths or manuscripts. It is no coincidence that Jenkinson was trained in what was known as “the natural history method” of bibliography, which took up a lepidopterist’s approach to the classification of incunabula, and required that catalogs of these earliest printed books scientifically detail a volume’s printer, typeface, and other such specifics. So it was that he would report in his diary with the same excitement that Schechter had “just found the colophon of Sirach!!” and “At night four slugs at the Linaria alpina!!” For Jenkinson, Ecclesiasticus and toadflax belonged in a single field guide.
(Photo Credit 5.2)
And there was, that summer, much for the librarian to punctuate emphatically in his journal, as Schechter’s sorting turned up a parade of major documents: a letter in the hand of Maimonides, fragments written in old French, Coptic, and Georgian, pages from the Palestinian Talmud, a Greek prayer book, more Ben Sira. (“Schechter found a double leaf of Ecclesiasticus and nearly went off his head,” according to Jenkinson.) In June Schechter wrote his article for the Times, “A Hoard of Hebrew Manuscripts,” which explained the cache and its history for the general reader, and Jenkinson read the proofs, then helped him compose a reply when, the day after Schechter’s article appeared on August 3, an anonymous reader—“a viper,” in Jenkinson’s words—wrote the following letter to the editor:
In his interesting description of the ancient “Geniza” in Cairo, Mr. Schechter omits to mention that the honour of the discovery of this treasure belongs truly to the learned librarian of the Bodleian, Dr. A. Neubauer, who was the first to light upon it and to obtain a large number of important fragments for that library. He has published, already some six years ago, a few of these documents, and has placed others at the disposal of scholars.… The other who went to that “hiding place” of the ancient synagogue in Cairo was Mr. Elkan N. Adler, who not only brought last year very valuable MSS. from there, but practically gave the key to it to Mr. Schechter. In apportioning the honours of the discovery we must be just and fair.
The letter was signed “Suum Cuique,” To Each His Own, and though it was a very public slap, the response that Schechter and Jenkinson composed is, given Schechter’s usual quick temper, notable for the calm it exudes. Perhaps this was Jenkinson’s influence: “The honour of discovering the Genizah belongs to the ‘nameless’ dealers in antiquities of Cairo, who for many years have continually offered its contents to the vari
ous libraries of Europe,” they wrote in Schechter’s name. Certain credit was indeed due to Adler, who “spent half a day in the Genizah. I learnt from him that he had been presented with some MSS. by the authorities. This is ‘the key he gave me.’ As to being fair and just ‘in apportioning the honours of the discovery of the MSS,’ ” he went on, “I could tell, unfortunately, a long tale about it, as ‘Suum Cuique’ is perhaps aware. Priority questions, however, are tedious, and I do not intend to become a burden to your readers.”
Behind the scenes, Schechter was understandably upset by this attack, though as is clear from a letter he wrote to Elkan Adler on the subject, he also had it in perspective. It seems Adler had written Schechter to assure him that he was not Suum Cuique, and Schechter responded with relief, “I had first some suspicion about you, thinking that it must be some distinguished person from whom the Times would receive an anonymous letter. But I saw afterwards that the English was too bad. Besides you are too openhearted for such mean tricks.… I do not mean to enter into a controversy. When one finds an autographed letter of Rabbenu Chushiel [an important eleventh-century biblical and talmudic commentator] one has no time for fighting with insects.”
Schechter understood he had much more critical things to do than draw out this petty controversy.* Around the same time, in a letter to Mayer Sulzberger, Schechter rattled off a list of the discoveries he had made over the previous few weeks and proclaimed that “the contents of the Genizah turn out to be of much greater importance than I ever dared to hope for.” He would not, he wrote, change these riches “for all Wall Street. I am finding daily valuable treasures. A whole unknown Jewish world reveals itself to us.”
That revelation did not come suddenly, of course, but was the product of slow and extremely painstaking labor on the part of many people. In the now-iconic photograph taken of Schechter “at work” in the Geniza room that month, we see a man entirely alone, his brow resting on one hand—a rabbinic version of Rodin’s The Thinker—as he contemplates a single scrap and seems to bear the entire weight of Jewish history on his sloped shoulders. He is surrounded on all sides by papery chaos: it is as though a tornado or a flood had just blasted through a huge stationery store. Yet Schechter sits still, like Prospero having tamed a phenomenal tempest.
The photograph was, as it happens, staged (there is, you will notice, no nose-bag in sight), and we know that Schechter was not often by himself in the room, which had quickly become a popular Cambridge “attraction” where visitors would often drop by to see the Romanian wonder in action: one of them described how “he may be found almost at any hour of the day deeply engaged in sorting and examining his fragments, with an expression in his face constantly changing from disappointment to rapturous delight.” When a guest came to call he would “tak[e] them from box to box, pointing out to them the significance of this or that MS. or the peculiarity of the specimens of Hebrew writing which lie scattered about on the long tables.”
(Photo Credit 5.3)
But more than visitors, Schechter had partners. As he himself had grown to understand perhaps better than anyone, this was not work for one person. “The Geniza is a world,” he wrote, “with all its religious and secular aspirations, longings, and disappointments, and it requires a world to interpret a world, or at least a large staff of workers.” Among the most committed of Schechter’s collaborators was Charles Taylor, who was responsible for sorting the postbiblical Hebrew fragments and palimpsests, and he came almost daily to the Cairo room “to revel there,” as Schechter put it, “in the inspection of the faded monuments of the Jewish past. This was probably the only sightseeing in which he ever indulged.” Agnes and Margaret, meanwhile, took on the task of sifting through the Syriac fragments, another Cambridge professor studied the Greek, and outside experts—one a lecturer in Arabic and Syriac from Jews’ College in London, the other a Cambridge-trained Jewish convert to Christianity (later ordained an Anglican priest)—were hired to handle, respectively, the Arabic and Judeo-Arabic fragments and the Hebrew Bible pages. At the same time, Jenkinson helped Schechter sort “select fragments” into drawers and oversaw the work of Andrew Baldrey, an employee of the library bindery, who had been assigned the task of cleaning and smoothing the fragments and placing them between glass.
(Photo Credit 5.4)
And so on—and on. “The day is short and the work is great,” quoted Schechter, in an 1898 sequel to his “Hoard of Hebrew Manuscripts,” a wide-ranging progress report in which he surveyed more of the gems he’d plucked from the piles over the course of the previous year: leaves with gilt letters; children’s primers; shorthand Bibles, which featured what is called trellis writing (“In the beginning, G. c. the h. a. the e.”); pages of Mishna and other compilations of Oral Law; a papyrus hymnal; as well as copious historical material, especially from the period between the birth of the towering communal and intellectual figure Saadia Gaon in 892 and the death of Maimonides at the start of the thirteenth century. This era, wrote Schechter, “forms, as is well known, one of the most important chapters in Jewish history.” But that chapter would now require serious revision, as “any number of conveyances, leases, bills, and private letters are constantly turning up, thus affording us a better insight into the social life of the Jews during those remote centuries.”
(Photo Credit 5.5)
He was not exactly complaining, but even as he rehearsed these discoveries, there was a new tone of melancholy fatigue creeping into Schechter’s words. Since his return from Egypt, he had devoted himself to the Geniza night and day, sun and snow—sacrificing his health and working himself past the point of exhaustion. He suffered especially in the winter, when his work was slowed to a snail’s pace by the lack of artificial light at the library. He was, he wrote to Sulzberger, red-eyed after a mere hour’s sorting, and forced to bathe his eyes in lotion. One “very dark” day he walked the two miles from his house to the library and “was unable to read a single fragment on account of the fog. It was never as bad as this minute.”
The irony, though, was this: as Schechter had come to grasp the truly miraculous magnitude of the Geniza, he had also begun to recognize the limits of his own strength—and to see, perhaps, the sun setting on his own role in the history of the Geniza’s retrieval. “It will,” he admitted, “occupy many a specialist, and much longer than a lifetime.” And he had other matters to attend to besides. In a strange twist of fate, the very same day that Jenkinson supervised the opening of the first Geniza crate at the library, Schechter had been approached with a tentative offer to become chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He would eventually take the job (of JTS president)—driven by a number of factors, including his sense that he was underappreciated by the powers that be at Cambridge. Upon his return from Cairo, he had been named curator of the Oriental Department at the library, given a small raise, and awarded an honorary degree, but as Mathilde wrote, “some felt it keenly that … if he had been a member of the Church of England he would have got a bishopric.” There was, then, the related and more substantive question of his growing alienation from British Jewry and the non-Jewish milieu in which he found himself in Cambridge. (“Life among the goyim means spiritual death to me,” he wrote at one low point, and at another painful moment he wondered aloud, “What shall become of my children in this wilderness?”) Most pressing of all, Schechter felt honor bound to serve. “Believing as I do,” he explained, “in the future of Judaism in America, I think it is my duty to be with my people where I may become some influence for good.”
Perhaps he had also taken to heart the admonitions of his old friend, student, and patron Claude Montefiore, who was extremely critical of the price his work on the Geniza had exacted from Schechter’s scholarly writing, and even went so far as to declare that if it had cost him his great work on theology, he wished the Geniza “had been burnt” before Schechter had ever come across it. “You think me a Philistine. Not so. But it makes me unutterably sad when I see your unique powe
rs not turned to noble account.” This was shortsighted of Montefiore: Schechter’s unique powers had certainly been turned to noble account through his work on the Geniza, but—after five years of sorting manuscripts—he himself clearly sensed it was time for something else. Or something more.
Even though he was glad to be leaving England behind, Schechter’s sense of debt to his friends in Cambridge was great. So many people there had helped him during what was perhaps the happiest and most fruitful period of his life. And though as the blustery Eastern European Jew surrounded by all these hushed-voiced, well-bred Englishmen he’d occasionally acted the bull in a china shop, he was one sensitive bull. In a letter to Jenkinson, composed shortly after he’d announced his resignation, which would take effect at the end of the Lent Term in March of 1902, he wrote in his emotive scrawl to thank the librarian for “the many kindnesses you have shown me during the last ten years. I only hope I have not drawn too much upon your patience and good will. But the times, especially since my return from Egypt, were not quite normal[,] my excitement finding expression in the most curious ways and counting upon your forbearance.”
Among the many gifts that were showered on Schechter upon his departure were a complete set of the Babylonian Talmud, a clock that rang the Cambridge chimes, and—from Agnes and Margaret—a silver kiddush cup engraved with the words of Ben Sira that they had discovered together: “Happy is the man who meditates on wisdom and occupies himself with understanding.” He was lauded in speeches and toasted at banquets—at one of which he responded by quoting his hero Abraham Lincoln’s farewell address, delivered in Springfield in February of 1861, before he traveled to Washington to assume the presidency: “No one not in my situation can appreciate my feeling of sadness at the parting.… Here I have lived nearly twenty years, and have passed from young man to old man. Here my children have been born. I now leave not knowing when, or whether even, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which has rested on me.” He went on, as Lincoln had, to wish for the assistance of “Him Who can go with me and remain with you, and be everywhere for good” as he bid them all “an affectionate farewell.”
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