In an Antique Land

by Amitav Ghosh

  Shaikh Musa, listening intently, sighed and shook his head. ‘Nashawy!’ he said. ‘There’s always some trouble there.’

  It was a big, bustling place, Nashawy, with almost fourteen hundred people, fully a thousand more than Lataifa! All those people living crowded together; no wonder they had trouble.

  They began to talk about Nashawy, and listening to them I wondered why I had not visited the village yet. It was just a mile or so down the road, and I would often hear the drivers of the pick-up trucks that went past Lataifa shouting ‘Nashawy? Nashawy?’ In my first few weeks in the hamlet I had often thought of climbing on for the ride. But now I had heard the name so often that it had begun to sound like a challenge: it had become a place that I would have to prepare for, just as I was preparing myself for Cairo.

  A little later, when I got up to leave, Shaikh Musa’s guests invited me to visit Nashawy, but Shaikh Musa cut them short. ‘He doesn’t have time now,’ he said. ‘He’s going to Cairo, to Masr.’

  He and his two sons came to the door to say goodbye. Shaikh Musa stood in the middle, holding his two grandsons by the hand, his eldest son, Ahmed, on his right and Hasan, the younger, on his left. ‘Come back soon, ya mister,’ he said, ‘and tell us about your trip. We want to hear about it, about Masr.’

  ‘I’ll tell you about it,’ I said, ‘as soon as I return.’

  At the end of the lane, I looked back: Shaikh Musa was still there, the picture of happiness and fulfilment, surrounded by his sons and grandsons.

  ‘Do you know what they say about Masr?’ he shouted after me. ‘They say she’s the umm al-duniyâ, the “mother of the world”.’

  10

  IN THE EIGHTEENTH century, a new breed of traveller began to flock into Cairo, Europeans with scholarly and antiquarian interests, for whom Masr was merely the picturesque but largely incidental location of an older, and far more important landscape. By this time Europe was far in advance of the rest of the world in armaments and industry, and on the points of those weapons the high age of imperialism was about to be ushered in. Masr had long since ceased to be the mistress of her own destiny; she had become a province of the Ottoman Empire, which was itself enfeebled now, allowed to keep its territories only by the consent of the Great Powers. The Indian Ocean trade, and the culture that supported it, had long since been destroyed by European navies. Transcontinental trade was no longer a shared enterprise; the merchant shipping of the high seas was now entirely controlled by the naval powers of Europe. It no longer fell to Masr to send her traders across the Indian Ocean; instead, the geographical position that had once brought her such great riches had now made her the object of the Great Powers’ attentions, as a potential bridge to their territories in the Indian Ocean.

  Over the same period that Egypt was gaining a new strategic importance within the disposition of European empires, she was also gradually evolving into a new continent of riches for the Western scholarly and artistic imagination. From the late seventeenth century onwards, Europe was swept by a fever of Egyptomania: sphinxes and pyramids began to appear in houses and gardens throughout the continent; several operas were written around themes from ancient Egypt; a succession of Popes became interested in the placing of Rome’s obelisks, and none other than Sir Isaac Newton took it upon himself to prove that Osiris, Bacchus, Sesostris and Sisac were but different names for the same deity. Concurrent with this growing interest, the study of Egyptian antiquities passed from being an esoteric and quasi-mystical pursuit into a freshly-charted field of scholarly enterprise, and in the service of the new science several travellers undertook journeys of discovery into Egypt.

  It was against this background that the first report of the Geniza was published in Europe. In 1752 or ’53, a Jewish traveller, Simon Van Geldern, an ancestor of the German poet Heinrich Heine, visited the Synagogue of Ben Ezra, in Babylon. The visit appears to have been an unremarkable one: all that Van Geldern had to say of it was that he had ‘looked around’ the Geniza and paid five coins. Effectively, the event passed unnoticed. At that time European scholarly interest was focused on the Egypt of the ancients; the Synagogue of Ben Ezra was too much a part of Masr to merit attention.

  By the end of the eighteenth century, Egypt had become the scholarly counterpart of those great landmasses that were then being claimed and explored by European settlers: unknown to herself, she was already well on her way to becoming a victim of the Enlightenments conception’s of knowledge and discovery. In fact, the first detailed plan for the conquest of Egypt was conceived not by a soldier but by a philosopher, Karl Liebniz, as early as 1670. More than a hundred years later, when Napoleon conceived of his invasion of Egypt, it was partly on the model of a scientific expedition.

  In the decades immediately after Napoleon’s invasion of 1798, Egypt attracted the husbandry of the Western academy in a way that no other place ever had. Yet all through this period, despite the concentrated efforts being expended on the soil around it, the Geniza remained entirely unnoticed: it was then still a part of a living tradition, and the conquering scholars had little interest in the dishevelled and unglamorous inhabitants of contemporary Masr.

  More than a hundred years passed after Simon Van Geldern’s visit with no public notice being taken of the Geniza at the Synagogue of Ben Ezra. By the time the next reports were published, Masr had passed into the control of the British, and her position on the route to India had become her curse, the proximate cause of her annexation. The visit that first brought the Geniza to the attention of the scholarly world occurred in 1864, and then, soon enough, events began to unfold quietly around it, in a sly allegory on the intercourse between power and the writing of history.

  In the summer of 1864, when the construction of the Suez Canal was well under way and Egypt was being readied, once again, to become the stepping-stone to India, a scholar and collector of Judaic antiquities by the name of Jacob Saphir paid several visits to the Synagogue of Ben Ezra while passing through Egypt. The synagogue was still greatly venerated by the Jewish inhabitants of Cairo, and travellers were often directed to it as a site worthy of pilgrimage.

  On his visits, Saphir had the Geniza pointed out to him from a distance and was told that it contained many worn and tattered old books. But when he asked to look into the chamber he met with a flat refusal. There was a snake curled up at the entrance, the officials of the synagogue told him, and it would be extremely dangerous to go in. Their refusal made Saphir all the more determined to investigate, and he returned to the Synagogue after obtaining permission to enter the chamber from the head of the Rabbinical court. The officials were not impressed, and they told him, laughing: ‘Can a man risk his life for nothing? He won’t even live out the year!’ They relented only when Saphir assured them that he knew how to charm snakes, and promised them a reward.

  As Saphir found it, the Geniza was full to a height of two and a half storeys; it was open to the sky on top, and strewn with rubble and debris within. He left after spending two exhausting days inside, without encountering ‘any fiery serpents or scorpions’, and taking only a ‘few leaves from various old books and manuscripts’. Upon closer examination, none of those fragments proved to be of any value, but describing his visit in his memoirs, Saphir added the rider: ‘But who knows what is still beneath?’

  His account appeared in 1866, arousing interest within a small circle of scholars, and lending credence to rumours that a potential treasure trove of documents was waiting to be uncovered in Cairo.

  The Synagogue of Ben Ezra was probably visited again, soon afterwards, by a man who eventually put together one of the largest collections of Hebrew manuscripts in the world. He was a Crimean Jew of the Karaite sect, Abraham Firkowitch, a collector renowned as much for his unscrupulousness as for his fine judgement. The collection he assembled over his lifetime is now in the State Public Library in St. Petersburg. The manuscripts were bought in two lots: Firkowitch sold the first one himself, and the second was acquired soon after his deat
h in 1874. The second lot alone contains about fifteen times as many Biblical manuscripts as there are in the British Museum. The German scholar Paul Kahle, who devoted the better part of a lifetime to the study of Firkowitch’s collection, estimated that in all the libraries of Europe, taken together, there were not even as many as a third of the number of Biblical manuscripts as there were in this one collection in St. Petersurg. It is known that many of these documents were from the Cairo Geniza, but as to which they were there is no way of knowing because Firkowitch never revealed his sources. He had obtained many of his documents by swindling synagogue officials in various parts of the Middle East, and it was his practice to conceal his collecting methods behind a veil of secrecy.

  If there is an irony today in the thought that a Jewish collector, not so very long ago, would have seen reason to steal manuscripts from his fellow Jews in Palestine in order to take them to Russia, it is not one that would have been apparent to Firkowitch: he was merely practising on his co-religionists the methods that Western scholarship used, as a normal part of its functioning, throughout the colonized world.

  Over the next few years more and more Geniza documents began to change hands. Already in the 1880s substantial quantities were being carried away to Palestine, Europe and the USA—by collectors who were often still unaware of the very existence of the Geniza. Towards the end of that decade, in 1888, a Jewish Briton, who was to play an important part in the dispersal of the Geniza, happened to spend Yom Kippur in the company of some of the prominent Jewish families of Cairo. His name was Elkan N. Adler, and upon his return to London he published an account of his visit in the Jewish Chronicle. He took issue there with those of his fellow British Jews who passed through Cairo and showed no interest in its Jewish community. For his own part he declared himself to be very well-satisfied with his experience. ‘It is not often,’ he wrote, ‘that a European has the opportunity of joining the aborigines in celebrating their feasts.’

  In the course of his visit Adler had developed an acquaintance with a family that held a position of enormous influence within the city’s Jewish community; their name was Cattaoui and they were to play a critical part in the subsequent history of the Geniza. The Cattaouis are thought to have come to Egypt by way of Holland and like most of the leading Jewish families of Cairo in the late nineteenth century, they were Sephardic rather than ‘Oriental’ Jews. By this time the indigenous Jews of Cairo, those whose relationship with the Synagogue of Ben Ezra was most direct, were a small and impoverished minority within the community. The Cattaouis had themselves once lived in a Jewish enclave of Cairo, but they were one of the first families to come out of the âra. They had gone on to establish a prosperous banking firm with offices in Cairo, Alexandria and Paris, and at the time of Adler’s visit they were by far the most powerful family within the community.

  The founder of the clan, Ya‘qub Cattaoui, was the first Egyptian Jew to be granted the title of ‘bey’, and in the early 1880s he was also made a baron of the Habsburg Empire. After this, mindful of their standing as Austrian aristocrats, the family often styled itself ‘von Cattaoui’. Little did the Barons von Cattaoui realize that they were to be instrumental, one day, in providing Elkan Adler with an opportunity to observe an aboriginal feast.

  In his account of his stay in Cairo, Adler mentioned the private synagogue of the Cattaouis and their adjoining residence, a magnificent palace that had once belonged to a Pasha. He also included a small anecdote about the current head of the family, Moses Cattaoui.

  About six years before Adler’s visit, the British had been confronted by an armed uprising led by Ahmed Arabi Pasha, a popular figure, venerated in Egypt to this day. The Egyptians were defeated in 1882, and in the aftermath of the war the British assumed direct control of the country’s administration. Soon afterwards the British ambassador in Constantinople, Lord Dufferin, was sent to Cairo to fashion a plan for the ‘rehabilitation’ of the country. The Cattaouis made their mansion available to him for the length of his stay, and in recognition of this service, Queen Victoria later sent Moses Cattaoui her portrait—a token which he treasured, writes Adler, ‘with no little pride’.

  Adler was given a glimpse of a remarkable document in the Cattaouis’ strong-room: the eight-hundred-year-old decree issued by the Caliph, giving possession of the Synagogue of Ben Ezra to its congregation. He also paid a visit to Fustat and was horrified to learn that the Synagogue was soon to be torn down and rebuilt. But otherwise the visit made no great impression on him: his inquiries about the Geniza elicited nothing of significance, and he came to the conclusion that ‘nowadays no Hebrew MSS of any importance are to be bought in Cairo.’ When he wrote his account of his journey, the Geniza did not so much as earn a mention.

  Within a couple of years, just as Adler had been told, the old structure of the Synagogue of Ben Ezra was indeed torn down and the building that stands on the site today was put up in its place. The Geniza must have been disturbed in the process of demolition, for the rapid dispersal of its contents appears to have begun at about that time. The officials of the synagogue and the notoriously canny antiquities dealers of Cairo were clearly well aware that those documents could command good prices on the international market, and through their efforts a large number of documents made their way at this time to libraries in Paris, Frankfurt, London, Vienna and Budapest. The Bodleian Library at Oxford also managed to acquire a large collection of Geniza manuscripts in these years, through the efforts of two members of its staff who were quick to recognize their value.

  At Cambridge, on the other hand, the manuscripts went virtually unnoticed. The expert in Hebrew documents in Cambridge then was Dr Solomon Schechter, a scholar of great distinction and a forceful, charismatic man, who also happened to be blessed with a natural warmth of spirit and a great deal of charm. He was sent several documents from the Geniza by a learned Rabbi, the scholarly Solomon Wertheimer of Jerusalem. In a few years Schechter’s name was to become more closely linked with the Geniza than any other, but until well into the 1890s he was of the opinion (like many other scholars) that these ‘Egyptian fragments’ were of little real importance. Rabbi Solomon Wertheimer wrote him several letters begging him to forward the documents to Oxford if he saw no value in them, but his pleas went unheeded: Doctor Schechter had not yet found the time to unpack them from their boxes.

  At about this time Elkan Adler must have realized that he had been wrong in his initial assessment, for he returned to Cairo in what was to prove the decisive year in the life of the Geniza, 1896. He took with him letters from his brother, Herman Adler (who was later to become the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire), and was received with great cordiality by the Chief Rabbi of Cairo, Rafaïl ben Shimon ha Cohen, and by his warders, who were none other than the senior members of the Cattaoui family. Between them, they granted Adler permission to enter the Geniza and to carry away a certain quantity of documents of his choice. He was personally conducted to Fustat by the Rabbi Rafaïl and, after spending three or four hours immersed in the chamber, he took away a sackful of documents. The material he gathered that day is now spread over several libraries, and a part of it forms the nucleus of the important collection of the Jewish Theological Seminary of New York.

  That very same year, 1896, two Presbyterian women, Agnes S. Lewis and Margaret D. Gibson, returned to England after a visit to Egypt, carrying a small collection of Geniza documents. The women were sisters, identical twins with scholarly inclinations, whose large personal fortunes allowed them to travel widely in the Middle East. They had acquired a good deal of experience in manuscripts and antiquities in the course of their wanderings, and on this occasion they were convinced that some of the documents they had brought back with them were of considerable value.

  Back in Cambridge, they picked out two fragments that seemed particularly interesting and took them to Solomon Schechter, the Reader in Talmudics. Schechter agreed to look at them, but chiefly out of politeness, for he was still sceptical abou
t the value of the ‘Egyptian fragments’. But it so happened that he was taken completely by surprise. One of the documents immediately caught his interest, and next morning, after examining it in his office, he realized that he had stumbled upon a sensational discovery. In great haste, Schechter sent out a note from the University Library:

  Dear Mrs Lewis,

  I think we have reason to congratulate ourselves. For the fragment I took with me represents a piece of the original Hebrew of Ecclesiasticus. It is the first time that such a thing was discovered. Please do not speak yet about the matter till tomorrow. I will come to you tomorrow about 11 p.m. and talk over the matter with you how to make the matter known.

  In haste and great excitement,

  Yours sincerely,

  S. Schechter.

  Schechter’s note is dated 13 May 1896. On that very day, Mrs Lewis sent an announcement of the discovery to the prestigious London journal, The Academy. The letter was published three days later, under the title, ‘Discovery of a Fragment of Ecclesiasticus in the Original Hebrew’ and it began: ‘All students of the Bible and of the Apocrypha will be interested to learn that, among some fragments of Hebrew MSS which my sister Mrs. Gibson and I have just acquired in Palestine a leaf of the Book of Ecclesiasticus has been discovered to-day by Mr S. Schechter, lecturer in Talmudic to the University of Cambridge.’

  In his own preliminary report published in a learned journal called the Expositor later the same year, Schechter announced that he had found a part of the original text of Ecclesiasticus (The Book of Wisdom) by Jesus Ben Sira, which was known to have been written in about 200BC: the original Hebrew had been lost centuries earlier and the book had survived only in Greek translation. ‘If it could be proved,’ he wrote, ‘that Sirach, who flourished in about 200BC composed his work, as some believe, in the Rabbinic idiom … then between Ecclesiasticus and the books of the Old Testament there must lie centuries, nay there must lie, in most cases, the deep waters of the Captivity.…’