Sacred Trash

by Adina Hoffman

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  Schechter’s mood was not quite so lofty. “Half-dead with fatigue and sleeplessness” on the SS Gironde, bound from Marseilles for Alexandria, he tried to sound circumspect as he, too, penned a note to Sulzberger and labeled his Egyptian mission simply “scientific.” Schechter the former Hasid was, though, never really comfortable with such drily academic terminology and added a warmer Jewish promise to “give you details when I am in Cairo p[lease] G[od].” It was the start of the last week of an eventful year, and that same evening on the boat Schechter scribbled a letter to his “Liebe Mathilde” in the affectionate garble of English and German that would constitute his near-daily reports to her from the East. While it was his startling discovery of the long-lost Hebrew original of Ben Sira that had propelled him to set out on this covert and fairly daredevilish operation, he had more earthly things on his mind that night. Besides the usual “Gruss und Kuss” (greetings and kisses) that he sent his wife and “den lieben Kinderechen” (the dear little children—the Schechters had three), he added that the terrible heat had made him take off all his clothes. “I am pining for Cairo,” he wrote, in English, “where I will put on thinner flannels.”

  This patchwork of high and low would mark much of Schechter’s adventure in Egypt, which found him at once planting his scholarly flag at the summit of an entire society’s literary, historical, religious, legal, and economic remains—and quite literally picking through some ten centuries’ worth of dust, mildew, and mouse droppings in order to do the same. The Geniza spilled with riches that looked an awful lot like rubbish—and the fact that Schechter recognized the value of this putative trash, and had chosen to make his way over many miles of land and sea in order to retrieve it, is powerful testament to the force of both his imagination and his personality. An intellectual less charismatic and socially adept (a Neubauer, let us say) might have understood everything there was to know about the traditional practice of geniza and the philological and theological disputes surrounding the text of Ecclesiasticus; indeed, he might have been able to pinpoint exactly where in Fustat the stash was located and been prepared to summon an impressive list of historical sources to support that assertion. But without Schechter’s dynamic presence in the here-and-now—his unvarnished ability to engage, excite, persuade, charm, and win the trust of almost all those who met him—the mission to Cairo would very likely have been an anticlimactic bust.

  However vaguely, Schechter had, it’s clear, known of the existence of an important geniza in Cairo for some time. Besides the hints provided by Cyrus Adler’s “anticas,” Wertheimer’s marked-down manuscripts, and Neubauer’s publication of texts “found in a Genizah at Cairo,” there were other clues. Margaret Gibson would later recount that after Schechter had identified the Ben Sira scrap that she and Agnes had brought back from their travels, he saw “the word ‘Fostat’ on several of our fragments … [and] suspected that [these manuscripts] had once been in the Genizah, or lumber room of the synagogue at old Cairo.”

  But perhaps Schechter’s most important Hebraic homing device came in the person of his lawyer friend Elkan Adler: not only had Adler already ventured inside the Geniza and told Schechter in detail of his visit, showing him the sack—a worn Torah mantle—full of papers that he’d been allowed to gather up there over the course of a few hours in January of 1896, but Adler seems to have provided Schechter with the actual scent of things to come. After examining Adler’s Geniza documents, Schechter had, in Adler’s own words, “used his eyes and nose to very good purpose, for it was its characteristic odour and appearance that enabled him to recognise the Gibson fragment as one of the family [of Geniza documents], and so he determined to go to Cairo himself, and bring back what I had left behind.”

  Once having pointed his snout in the direction of Egypt, Schechter still faced the tricky task of finding money to pay for the trip and somehow keeping the expedition under wraps. Given the race then under way with Oxford to find the remainder of Ben Sira (which was, at this stage, still the ostensible reason for his journey: so far nearly a quarter of the book had been identified by the respective Cambridge and Oxford scholars), it was imperative that no one beyond the smallest circle of confidants know of Schechter’s plans. He couldn’t, then, ask the university for money as he had done to finance his Italian manuscript-hunting trip; the trustees of the research fund would be obliged to publicize the fact of his voyage, which would ruin the whole scheme.

  Instead Schechter turned conspiratorially to several Cambridge friends for help, among them the Scottish physician Donald MacAlister, who was also close to Agnes and Margaret and was, according to Mathilde, “intensely interested” in the prospect of Schechter’s search for the lost manuscript “even if there was only the slightest chance of its recovery.” Understanding the urgency of the matter and the need for the utmost secrecy, MacAlister promised to approach the very next day the philosopher Henry Sidgwick, who was both a wealthy man and one of the leading liberals in Cambridge: he and his wife had been early and active advocates for the admission of women to the university. (Sidgwick cut a formidable figure in both moral and physical terms and looked, in Mathilde’s estimation, “like Jupiter on the coins found in ancient Elis.”) Schechter’s enthusiasm seems to have been catching, as Sidgwick, for his part, was “keenly alive to the romance of [the] idea” and offered immediately to arrange a leave of absence for the Reader in Rabbinics and to pay personally for the whole trip.

  In the meantime, though, yet another friend of Schechter’s—the soft-spoken, philanthropically minded Hebraist, mathematician, Anglican priest, and Master of St. John’s College, Charles Taylor—had somehow heard about the plan, and also been infected. For several years, Schechter had taught a Tuesday afternoon class that was attended by some of the most distinguished professors at the university. Taylor was nearly a decade Schechter’s elder and had already published a highly regarded translation of the mishnaic Pirkei Avot, which he called Sayings of the Jewish Fathers, as well as several books with titles like Geometrical Conics, Including Anharmonic Ratio and Projection, with Numerous Examples. Yet for all his seniority and erudition, he was one of Schechter’s most devoted students—and heir to a long and venerable tradition of Christian Hebraists at Cambridge. According to Mathilde, Taylor “insisted that he had the first right to defray expenses, being a Hebrew scholar and a pupil of Dr. Schechter’s.” (Here it is perhaps worth noting that Schechter’s strong objections to the Protestant higher critics in no way precluded or interfered with the sympathetic feelings and respect he had for many devout Christians. Schechter held Taylor and his Hebrew scholarship in particular in the greatest esteem, and would write after Taylor’s death, “His friendship to Judaism … arose out of his love for Hebrew literature, to which he applied himself in his youth with a zeal and devotion hardly equalled by any contemporary Jew. To him the Rabbis were like unto [Ben] Sirah of old, ‘the Fathers of the World’ towards whom he never failed in the filial duty of reverence.”) And so it was arranged: the honor of footing the big bill would fall to the stout Taylor, while Sidgwick would have to be content with underwriting any later expenses that might arise in conjunction with Schechter’s journey. The initial outlay was £200, or some $18,000 in today’s terms.

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  Armed with a pile of visiting cards, his good black suit, and a letter of introduction to Cairo’s grand rabbi from England’s chief rabbi, Hermann Adler (written, in fact, by his brother, Elkan, who vouched for the fact that Schechter was both a “lamdan and tzaddik,” a scholar and a righteous man), another to the head of the Jewish community in Cairo, and a third, from the vice-chancellor of Cambridge to the de facto ruler of Egypt, Lord Cromer, Schechter boarded the train from London to Marseilles in mid-December. Some eight days later he found himself in Cairo, which appeared, at first glance, disappointing. “Everything in it calculated to satisfy the needs of the European tourist is sadly modern, and my heart sank within me when I reflected th
at this was the place whence I was expected to return laden with spoils the age of which would command respect even in our ancient seats of learning.” Things began to look up, though, after his meeting with the rabbi, Aharon Raphael ben Shimon, who explained that Old Cairo, that is, Fustat, was where Schechter should be searching—and not in the newer city. The atmosphere there seemed more promising to Schechter, as it was “a place old enough to enjoy the respect even of a resident of Cambridge.”

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  To Mathilde, meanwhile, referring to an earlier book he had edited, Schechter wrote that the rabbi—a bearded and bespectacled man who wore long eastern robes and a squat kind of turban—“kissed my Avoth de Rabbi Nathan three times. I would prefer a kiss from you. The rabbi has a younger brother who is his right hand. The way to win the heart of the rabbi is, I can see, through this brother and thus I flirted with him … for hours.” He had decided, he told her, to take Arabic lessons three times a week. “You see how practical your old man is. If something is in the Genizah we shall, with the help of God, get it.”

  Schechter was eager to roll up his sleeves and start working, though he had, from the outset, to accustom himself to the meandering rhythms of the place—to the Jewish community’s lengthy and involved preparations for the Sabbath (which precluded entry to the synagogue on business), the regular fast days and funerals (which meant the shuttering of the whole Jewish quarter), and the leisurely courtship ritual in which he was involved with the rabbi and other officials. A few days after his first audience with Ben Shimon, Schechter offered to take him for a ride to the pyramids, which the rabbi himself had, incredibly, never seen. “It will cost me ten shillings,” he told Mathilde. “But this is the only way to make myself popular.” Later he would write her with an urgent request for two hundred “used English stamps” for the rabbi, a collector.

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  He also discovered that the hotel where he’d booked a room, the Royal, was “a true hell of immorality,” and was located on a street of bordellos. “You don’t need to worry about my virtue,” he assured his no-doubt-alarmed wife back in England, “but I cannot let any decent person come [visit] here.” Soon after his arrival, the head of the Cairo Jewish community, Moise Cattaui, found him a more suitable hotel, the Metropole, which housed many English guests, and was both cleaner and cheaper than the first. The Cattauis, as it happened, knew a thing or two about finances: they had risen from modest money-lending roots to amass a fortune in banking, real estate, and railroads, so becoming one of the wealthiest Jewish families in Egypt. As patricians who had managed to secure the protection of the Austro-Hungarian empire, they had even gone so far as to refashion themselves in the 1880s as the “von Cattauis.” They lived in a lavish mansion in the fashionable Ismailiyya district, on a street often referred to as rue Cattaui. With its large private synagogue, their house was known as a “palace” and was adjoined by a pond and date-palm-filled garden so sprawling it looked like a park. They welcomed Schechter in style, introducing him to the other community leaders, offering to accompany him to the Geniza, and inviting him over for regular kosher meals. Schechter, a man of no small appetites, wound up dining there several times a week for the length of his stay in Cairo.

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  He may have been impatient to start work, but his wait proved worthwhile as, five days after arriving in the Egyptian capital, Schechter was finally granted access—of the most generous and total sort—to the Geniza: chaperoned by the rabbi, he made his way in a carriage to the old walled area known as the Fortress of Babylon, where the Ben Ezra synagogue was located, and the rabbi escorted him inside the compound. “After showing me over the place and the neighbouring buildings, or rather ruins, the Rabbi introduced me to the beadles of the synagogue, who are at the same time the keepers of the Genizah, and authorised me to take from it what, and as much as I liked.”

  “Now as a matter a fact,” he would later write, “I liked it all.”

  Schechter’s account of what he discovered when he climbed up the ladder and peered down into the Geniza is perhaps the most famous description ever written of that remarkable room. More than a hundred years later, “A Hoard of Hebrew Manuscripts,” published in the London Times some six months after his return to England, also remains the finest and most highly charged sketch of the astonishing jumble the attic chamber contained. “One can,” he wrote,

  hardly realise the confusion in a genuine old Genizah until one has seen it. It is a battlefield of books, and the literary production of many centuries had their share in the battle, and their disjecta membra are now strewn over its area. Some of the belligerents have perished outright, and are literally ground to dust in the terrible struggle for space, whilst others, as if overtaken by a general crush, are squeezed into big, unshapely lumps, which even with the aid of chemical appliances can no longer be separated without serious damage to their constituents. In their present condition these lumps sometimes afford curiously suggestive combinations; as, for instance, when you find a piece of some rationalistic work, in which the very existence of either angels or devils is denied, clinging for its very life to an amulet in which these same beings (mostly the latter) are bound over to be on their good behaviour and not interfere with Miss Jair’s love for somebody. The development of the romance is obscured by the fact that the last lines of the amulet are mounted on some I.O.U., or lease, and this in turn is squeezed between the sheets of an old moralist, who treats all attention to money affairs with scorn and indignation. Again, all these contradictory matters cleave tightly to some sheets from a very old Bible. This, indeed, ought to be the last umpire between them, but it is hardly legible without peeling off from its surface the fragments of some printed work, which clings to old nobility with all the obstinacy and obtrusiveness of the parvenu.

  It is not clear how long it took Schechter to realize the singular nature of the cache that Rabbi Ben Shimon had put so unquestioningly at his disposal. That first night after his return from the Geniza, he could only manage an exhausted and fairly telegraphic German postscript to a letter composed and ready to send to Mathilde. He had, he reported, been working since morning in the Geniza and had emerged with two sacks of fragments, now beside him in his hotel room. Though he was (again) “half dead” with fatigue, he did have the strength to declare, “There are many valuable things there.” He thought he would need “at least another week” to clear out the Geniza, because “the workers are very slow.” But first things first: “I must,” he announced, “take a bath immediately.” He was covered in the ancient grit he called Genizahschmutz. As it happened, he would need to keep scrubbing off such hallowed dirt for most of the following month.

  The work took a full four weeks, and throughout that time Schechter veered between states of elation and disgust. He was, on the one hand, fascinated by certain aspects of Cairo, of which “there is so much to tell … it is hardly possible to commence. One is drowned in embarras de richesses.” And the Geniza itself certainly accounted for much of this figurative wealth. It offered far too huge and scrambled a mix to sift through in situ, so he had decided to comb out as much of the printed material as possible, then simply ship home all the manuscripts he could manage. He would worry about sorting them later. “With the help of God,” he enthused to Mathilde, “quite a lot of good things will be found.”

  The physical labor involved in gathering and bagging the fragments was, on the other hand, punishing in the extreme. “A beastly unhealthy place,” the Geniza was dark and filled with medieval dust, which “settles in one’s throat and threatens suffocation,” and the room was, too, “full of all possible insects.” In one letter to Mathilde, he complained in his typical bilingual mishmash that he was so bitten by the mosquitoes, “ich full of spots bin.”

  Still worse than the bugs were the synagogue beadle and his helpers—whose assistance Schechter realized he needed in order to pack up the stash and whose incessant demands for bakshish Schechter
had little choice but to meet. In public he made light of the arrangement, describing it almost as he might for the amusement of cognac-quaffing guests at a Cambridge dinner party: “Of course, they declined to be paid for their services in hard cash of so many piastres per diem. This was a vulgar way of doing business to which no self-respecting keeper of a real Genizah would degrade himself.” Instead, they coaxed from him these endless tips, “which, besides being a more dignified kind of remuneration has the advantage of being expected also for services not rendered.” It was apparently expected as well that the “Western millionaire” would provide a steady stream of handouts to everyone who came and went from the synagogue while he was toiling there—“the men as worthy colleagues employed in the same work (of selection) as myself, or, at least in watching us at our work; the women for greeting me respectfully when I entered the place, or for showing me their deep sympathy in my fits of coughing caused by the dust.”

  In private, meanwhile, this nonstop schnorring drove Schechter into fits of rage, and he spared no scorn when it came to the beadle Bechor in particular. “The greatest thief that ever lived,” he dubbed the man in one letter and denounced the “infernal scoundrel” in another. While one can surely understand Schechter’s frustration at the near-constant demands on his wallet (or Taylor’s), there is, to modern ears, something unsettling about Schechter’s rants on the subject of bakshish and the beadle. Consciously or not, Schechter almost seems to be echoing Baedeker’s very Victorian Egypt: Handbook for Travelers, which he carried with him on his trip, and which warned unsuspecting European tourists that bakshish should never be given “except for services rendered,” as “the seeds of cupidity are thereby sown.” Furthermore, “most Orientals regard the European traveller as a Croesus, and sometimes too as a madman—so unintelligible to them are the objects and pleasures of traveling.”