Sherlockian Ruminations from a Stormy Petrel
Page 3
“It had to be You”:
Beyond peradventure, a British Adler was the considered Hebrew rabbi of Scandal...not one from ancient Palestine and certainly not a New Yorker.
The Jewish Chronicle wrote on July 21,1891 (Scandal of Bohemia publication: July 1891): Nathan Adler and Hermann Adler “gave their name to a regime, to an era... to the system of Rabbinate which had long come to be known as ‘Adlerism’, the keynote of which was the close consolidation of religious government and the concentration of ecclesiastical control... “
Perhaps Doyle had in mind a mingling of all these Adlers - for there were yet more extraordinary and distinguished among them, and all during this same period. A brother to Hermann was Elkan Adler (1861-1946). He was an author, lawyer, historian, and collector of Jewish books and manuscripts. He worked for Moses Montefiore and thus travelled extensively to the Holy Land. Elkan was among the first to explore the documents stored in Cairo. From his 1895 visit there, he brought over 25,000 manuscript fragments back to England and built an enormous library of old Jewish documents.
It could not have been yet another brother, Marcus Adler, because he was not a rabbi. He was no less illustrious for he was an actuary, vice-president of the Institute of Actuaries, a founder of the Royal Statistical and London Mathematical Societies, and a publisher as well.
The Adler women weren’t an afterthought - recall Henrietta, Rabbi Hermann’s daughter. Rabbi Hermann also had a sister - Ida, born in 1860, and sandwiched between her accomplished brothers. She married diamond broker Magnus Schaap in 1881. As had Godfrey Norton and Irene Adler fled London after their wedding, so too did Ida and her husband, fleeing emblematically and anglicizing their last name to “Sharp.”
In Conclusion:
In the context of the years 1888-1891, it is indisputable that one of the remarkable Adlers of London, or an aggregate, were the “Hebrew rabbi” of Holmes’ scrapbook.
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