Sacred Trash
Page 3
There were, to be sure, certain basic differences at work in the way the world at large viewed—and coveted—the golden funerary masks and hieroglyph-rich steles of ancient Egypt and the way it saw (or in fact didn’t see) the moldering and essentially unbeautiful manuscripts housed in that attic room in Fustat. Europe’s fascination with everything ancient and Egyptian was tied up inextricably with imperial plotting and power plays—a trend that began with Napoleon’s 1798 conquest of the country, which brought on its battleships an erudite army of archaeologists, surveyors, chemists, mineralogists, and engineers. But the men who first got wind of the Geniza and scrambled to uncover its contents during those same early years were propelled by a much more ragtag blend of motives. And each worked, for the most part, alone. The Geniza’s holdings were then just the faintest rumor among a tiny circle of scholars, travelers, and manuscript dealers, and hardly the object of the sort of popular mania directed at the mummies and scarabs of ancient Egypt.
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Still, there are striking parallels between the unearthing of various Pharaonic tombs and that of the Geniza: in both cases, the glories of a past civilization might easily have faded into the sands had they not been hoisted out of oblivion by an active modern imagination, or several active modern imaginations. Both salvage operations went through a number of distinct methodological stages, with the so-called pillage of the first phase evolving later into a more systematic approach—and an emphasis on grand monuments (or, in the case of the Geniza, major works by famous men) giving way to a fascination with an accumulated wealth of minute, daily details. An early Egyptian explorer, according to the Reverend Baikie, “looked for colossi,” while his “successor looks for crockery.” The same would also prove true of later generations of Geniza explorers.
But first came the “plunderers.”
The Russian Avraham Firkovitch has long been considered one of the Geniza’s most bald-faced looters: “an assiduous and quite unscrupulous collector” he has been called, and “its first systematic” pillager. This is not, perhaps, the fairest designation, since Schechter himself might also be accused of a certain sort of plunder where the Geniza is concerned. (The line between ransack and redemption is thin with regard to the whisking away of such riches.) Firkovitch’s name is now synonymous with the trove of manuscripts that he teased from a Cairo geniza in the mid-1860s and which has been held since in the State Public Library in St. Petersburg. After the fall of the Soviet Union, however, documents long off-limits to researchers revealed that the Egyptian geniza whose contents Firkovitch spirited back to Russia was not the Ben Ezra synagogue’s, as had previously been assumed. That said, Firkovitch did experience a very close encounter with the Geniza, which makes him a part of our story.
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Born around 1786, Firkovitch was a Karaite—a member of the once surprisingly influential, now endangered Jewish denomination that challenged the authority of rabbinic oral tradition and evolved an alternative understanding of biblical law. Exceptionally tall, relentlessly pugnacious, and almost always mired in debt, Firkovitch was a man obsessed: he was desperate to revivify and unite the various Karaite communities throughout Russia and the East. He was convinced that many of the Jews of Russia had once been Karaites. Moreover, he was eager to prove that the Karaites had been present in the Crimea for many millennia and so could not be responsible for the death of Christ. It has been claimed that, with this defensive though hardly watertight theory in mind, Firkovitch forged certain Karaite manuscripts as well as hundreds of ancient Crimean gravestones with Karaite inscriptions. However loony some of his ideas and dubious many of his methods, Firkovitch was clearly one of the first to have recognized the importance of genizot as a historical resource. From as early as the 1830s, when he first traveled to Jerusalem, he began to collect the manuscripts he found in these sacred crannies.
In the process, Firkovitch became something of a geniza-hound, and when he returned to southern Russia, he made it a habit to travel from village to village—upon arrival, immediately heading for the synagogue and sniffing out its geniza. Whether it was held in a special attic chamber, buried in the graveyard, or stashed inside a wall, Firkovitch would find it. And his sense of sight was as good as his nose. He had, it was said, an especially keen eye for comparing the relative thickness of such synagogue walls and detecting a hidden stash.
So it was that as an energetic seventy-six-year-old, Firkovitch visited the East yet again on another manuscript-finding mission. As he traveled, he foraged for papers in Jerusalem’s Karaite synagogue, splurged on others in Aleppo and Beirut, finagled a batch from the Samaritan community in Nablus, and bought several more from the aforementioned Cairo Geniza visitor and self-proclaimed snake charmer Yaakov Safir. Firkovitch eventually also made his way to Cairo, where he spent some six months sorting carefully through and packing up much of the contents of what he characterized in a letter as “a very large geniza.”
For almost a century now, scholars have accused Firkovitch of having had “an interest in concealing the way in which he used to collect his material” and being “reticent about the origin of the treasures which he brought together in many years of daring travels.” While he may indeed have tried to maintain a certain air of mystery in public, now that his private archive has at last been opened, this portrait of Firkovitch as track-covering sham artist seems at best ungenerous: in a letter to a Karaite friend back in the Crimea he states explicitly that the room where he was working was “the geniza of the ancient synagogue that belongs to the Disciples of Scripture,” which is to say, the Karaites—and not the “Rabbanite” (i.e., normative, Talmud-studying) Jews of the Ben Ezra community.
Yet Firkovitch makes it explicit in his letters that he also visited the Ben Ezra synagogue—and in fact intended, in his own words, “to take the [Ben Ezra] geniza out from under the dust … I’ve already opened it and seen that there’s hope of finding valuable things there.” (Upon hearing about the wonders that had been discovered in the Karaite geniza—which seems to have been more like a library than the Ben Ezra room, containing as it did many more complete volumes—the head of the Rabbanite community in Fustat was, Firkovitch reports, “burning with desire to open their genizot as well.” He was suffering, in other words, from a painful case of geniza envy—a syndrome that, we will see, grew increasingly common over the course of the next fifty years.) This time Firkovitch’s eyes were bigger than his stomach, or his wallet, and it seems he ran out of time—he was much too busy sorting through the substantial Karaite stash—and lacked the money to carry out this grand plan. Or maybe, like Safir, all that frantic medieval paper-pushing had simply exhausted him. In a weary-sounding letter to his son-in-law he admitted that he was ready to come home and was “tired of traveling back and forth, for I have grown old.” Though in another letter he refers to the “six pages that I took from the darkness of the cave that’s in the graveyard of our brothers the Rabbanites in New Cairo, close to Egyptian Zoan.” This was, it appears, one of the tombs in the cemetery known as the Basatin, located several miles from Fustat, which served as a sort of auxiliary geniza for the Ben Ezra synagogue. As the Geniza room filled to bursting, the community seems to have taken to burying their overflow there.
Whether he dug up additional documents in the Basatin we do not know, though the considerable number of fragments from the Firkovitch collection that match torn scraps found in other Geniza collections all over the world does make one wonder. Or perhaps he took more from Ben Ezra than he admitted in his letters. He describes very vaguely spending “three days there,” during which time he says he was treated by a doctor for pains in the sinews of his hands, washed the synagogue’s carved wooden wall inscriptions with a mixture of clay and lime, then copied them into a notebook. Could it be that such a serious geniza aficionado wouldn’t also have plucked at least a few choice manuscripts from the bursting upstairs cache?
It does appear likely that, soon after Firko
vitch’s departure, papers he left behind in the Karaite synagogue were snatched up and put on the market by a gaggle of antiquities dealers who had begun to notice that something very interesting lay crumpled in the back rooms of Cairo’s old synagogues. European libraries and collectors were ready to pay good money for these dusty scraps. Still, secrecy was key: this was too precious a quarry to simply open to the world.
Throughout the 1880s and into the 1890s, various Western travelers and collectors trotted in and out of Fustat and continued to miss what was literally right under their noses. The manuscript maven, lawyer, and brother of England’s chief rabbi, Elkan Adler, visited the Ben Ezra synagogue in 1888 and came within inches of the Geniza when he climbed a rotting ladder up to the purportedly precious “Scroll of Ezra” (almost, he wrote, breaking his neck in the process). But even this expert tracker of old Hebrew writings—a man who enthused in another context that “there is no sport equal to the hunt for a buried manuscript” and whose later role in the recovery of the Geniza would be quite important—accepted at face value the declarations of Cairo’s Jewish leaders that they deposited all their worn-out books in the Basatin cemetery. When he returned home to England he published a lively account of his Eastern adventures, and went so far as to declare, “Nowadays there are no Hebrew manuscripts of any importance to be bought in Cairo.”
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Adler also reported that “it was not without a shudder that I heard that the respectable community of Cairo had resolved to have [the synagogue] whitewashed, cleaned and renovated in a few months.” In fact, the Ben Ezra building was teetering near collapse, and several of the wealthy Jewish families of Cairo—who lived and prayed elsewhere but who recognized the historical importance of the site and continued to visit it as a place of pilgrimage—had decided to knock it over completely and construct a new building, according to the old model.
The work of razing the structure seems to have begun soon after Adler’s visit—or, as a December 20, 1889, letter by one eyewitness, the retired British priest and die-hard Egyptophile Greville Chester, put it, “These wretches have demolished the most curious and interesting old building & are building a new one on the same site.” Since the 1860s, Chester’s poor health had sent him tilting toward the sun and the Nile every winter (by 1881 he claimed to have logged thirty-eight trips there) and, with the help of what sounds like a very developed knack for haggling and smuggling, he had become a steady supplier of small Egyptian objects—scarabs, seals, coins, and engraved gems—to the British Museum and the Ashmolean at Oxford, as well as papyri and other manuscripts to that university’s Bodleian Library. (Among his more intriguing purchases for the British Museum was one of the first prosthetics in history, a several-thousand-year-old mummy’s false digit, which has come to be known as the Greville Chester Great Toe.) He also wrote scholarly articles about archaeology, including one on the ancient churches of Cairo. Chester maintained—incorrectly—as did others at the time, that the Ben Ezra synagogue had once been a church “which,” he proclaimed, “it is much to be wished, could be rescued from its present state of profanation and restored to Christian worship.” The irony, then, was that this unabashed anti-Semite—who opposed the election of Jews to the British Parliament and had once referred to Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli as “the Jew Earl, Philo-Turkish Jew, and Jew Premier”—was among the first Westerners to identify the Geniza as a potential gold mine, and to adopt an oddly conspiratorial, almost propriety attitude toward what would turn out to be one of the modern world’s most important sources of knowledge about earlier Jewish literature and life.
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In that same December 1889 letter to E. W. B. Nicholson, the librarian of the Bodleian, Chester writes breathlessly of “a quantity” of Hebrew manuscript fragments he had just discovered that morning. His conspiratorial letter in many ways anticipates Schechter’s note to Mrs. Lewis:
The matter must not be talked about at present, but I tell you they come from the oldest synagogue at Mis’r el-Ateekeh—Old Cairo—once the Ch[urch] of S[aint] Michael, given in the early Middle Ages by an Arab Sultan to the Jews.…
A room has been laid open whose floor is literally covered with fragments of MSS & early printed Hebr. books, & rolls of leather. From these I selected what I have got, & though I bought the best I could find there were doubtless numbers of others worth having. I only fear the lot will be destroyed or perhaps buried, & I could not get the people to say what will be done with them. One fragment of a book I got seems to me to be cabalistic. As I go on board my dahabeyeh [houseboat] tomorrow I cannot send off any more, but when I have time, I will sort the MSS., clean out the filth, try to straight[en] them out, & send them to you by Book Post from time to time.… I was almost suffocated with dust & devoured by fleas when making selections.… I suppose most of the bits are earlier than AD 1400 & some much more so?
Chester’s account is—like so much about this stage of the Geniza’s history—more than slightly (perhaps willfully) obscure: he describes the demolition of the synagogue in the past tense, though he also seems to have seen the room, still standing, with his own eyes, as he inhaled its dust and was bitten by its fleas. Or perhaps the grit and bugs clung to the fragments brought to him by some nameless middleman, from whom he was buying the manuscripts? However he acquired them, the fragments he would sell to Oxford over the course of the next several years would form the basis of that university’s Geniza collection—the first in Europe. Though even after he had gotten into a fairly regular routine of bundling the fragments up and shipping them to England, he also maintained that slightly paranoid pitch, chastising the Bodleian librarian in a January 1890 letter from Luxor: “I will beg you not to speak of the reception of MSS openly on a post card, as it might tend to their being watched for and confiscated in the Post! It would not be legal to do so probably, but that would make no difference with the powers that be.” And again about a year later: “Please don’t on an open card mention of what the packets rec[eive]d consist, as I believe they are apt to be stopped at the PO, if the contents were known.” Chester appears to have been less concerned with foiling the manuscript-hungry competition than he was with sidestepping the strict customs laws governing the export of antiquities. (The British now controlled Egypt, but the French still dominated the Antiquities Service and watched the mail closely for illicit shipments.) But the nervous nature of his warning was typical of much of the talk surrounding the so-called Egyptian fragments at this stage.
Many of the reports about the 1889–90 “repairs” of the synagogue are tinged with the same cloak-and-dagger tone. “To quote from a reliable source whose name cannot be mentioned,” wrote two otherwise forthright scholars in a hushed footnote to a 1927 museum catalog:
Before the late Dr Schechter transferred its remains to Cambridge, many dealers helped themselves to small bundles of fragments which they would obtain by bakshish [something between a tip and a bribe] from the beadle of the old Synagogue at Fustat (Old Cairo), where the Genizah had been discovered in an attic as a result of the work of repairing the Synagogue. The workmen on tearing down the roof dumped all the contents of this attic into the court-yard, and there the MSS were lying for several weeks in the open. During these weeks many dealers could obtain bundles of leaves for nominal sums. They later sold these bundles at good prices to several tourists and libraries.
It was only a matter of time before the manuscripts from these piles began to make their way from the dealers of Cairo out to all corners of the earth. In his capacity as Middle Eastern commissioner to the World’s Columbian Exposition, to be held in Chicago in 1893, the Arkansas-born Semiticist and Jewish communal leader Cyrus Adler (no relation to Elkan) made an 1891 business trip to Cairo. “I happened one day to find,” he recounted,
several trays full of parchment leaves written in Hebrew, which the merchant had labeled Anticas. I saw at a glance that these were fairly old. As I wore a pith helmet and a khaki suit, like e
very other tourist, he thought I wanted one as a souvenir. But indicating an interest in the whole lot I purchased them, big and little, some of the pieces only one sheet, some of them forty or fifty pages, at the enormous price of one shilling per unit, and thus brought back to Europe what was probably the second collection from the Genizah, certainly the first to America.
In 1892—some four years before Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson handed Solomon Schechter the “dirty scrap” of Ecclesiasticus they had bought from a dealer in Palestine or Cairo who may also have nabbed it off one of those same courtyard piles—Cyrus Adler showed Solomon Schechter the parchment pieces he’d bought that day. Later he wrote: “I have always flattered myself that this accidental purchase of mine was at least one of the leads that enabled Dr. Schechter to make his discovery of the Cairo Genizah.” (Adler would, as it happened, bring more of Egypt than Geniza fragments back to the United States: the Chicago Exposition, which he helped to plan, featured not only the world’s first Ferris wheel, Cracker Jacks, and Cream of Wheat, but an extremely popular attraction called “A Street in Cairo,” complete with a mosque, fountains, real live “Egyptians, Arabs, Nubians, and Soudanese,” and the so-called danse du ventre, that is, belly-dancing, advertised by the exhibit’s organizers as “the wild, weird performance peculiar to the race.”)