Sacred Trash by Adina Hoffman Read Free Book Online

in the East?”
    While it seems Neubauer didn’t immediately grasp the true worth ofthe Geniza manuscripts offered for sale by Reverend Chester and Rabbi Wertheimer, he did at least have the foresight to acquire some of these for the library. And it does appear that their value began gradually to dawn on him, as it was later recounted that in the early nineties a certain professor “used to see the desk of Dr Neubauer … covered with portions of books which Dr Neubauer told him had come from the East, his professional discretion not permitting him to disclose their exact source.”
    By 1894, though, Neubauer had actually announced in print the existence of a certain Egyptian geniza. Perhaps it was a way of marking Oxford’s turf, but in a scholarly article from that year, he declared that “the Bodleian Library has lately acquired a considerable number of fragments of Hebrew MSS., found in a Genizah at Cairo, which contain a great deal of unknown matter in the branch of post-biblical literature.” And in the next issue of the same journal, he again proclaimed, “The collection of Hebrew and Arabic fragments coming from a Genizah in Egypt, and lately acquired by the Bodleian Library, rivals that of St. Petersburg, if not in quantity, certainly in quality.”
    Even as Neubauer was making public the fact of a geniza, he was also plotting behind the scenes to try to get more of the stash for Oxford. Meanwhile, the situation back in Cairo had shifted. In 1892 the new synagogue building had gone up—“a hideous square abomination” in the ornery estimation of Greville Chester—and many of the manuscripts lying out in the courtyard had apparently been returned to the new structure’s room, built, it was said, according to the original floor plan, but now made accessible by a ladder placed in the women’s section. Other manuscripts from the Geniza were then buried around the synagogue grounds—a practice that, it seems, had been going on for some time before the “renovation.” (So goes one plausible account. In fact, it is notable that after more than a century of research into Ben Ezra, no one has yet managed to account definitively for just what took place during the synagogue “renovations.” Was the original Geniza destroyed andreconstructed completely, and then—bizarrely—refilled, or did it somehow remain standing while the rest of the building was razed and re-created? There are no clear answers.)
    The idea that valuable Hebrew parchments and papers might also lie underground added a new archaeological dimension to the quest for Hebrew manuscripts. In 1889—not coincidentally, near the start of a decade in which recently excavated Greek papyri flooded the Middle Eastern market—the Egypt Exploration Fund uncovered several such fragments in the mounds around Fustat, and these Hebrew manuscripts eventually made their way to the Bodleian. Though they were donated by the Fund to the library, the man responsible for salvaging them was a mysterious figure known as the Count Riamo d’Hulst, who claimed to have been a subject of “the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg” but who may have been a deserting German officer from the Franco-Prussian War. As an employee of the Fund, d’Hulst had been digging near the synagogue when he’d come across the fragments, which he shipped back to England together with several Kufic tombstones, some pottery, coins, and glass pieces. He was later encouraged by the Bodleian to oversee a much more extensive dig at the site, and the fruits of his excavations would, in Neubauer’s words, “form the nucleus of our large collection of Egyptian fragments.”

    ( Photo Credit 2.9 )
    D’Hulst’s story is, though, yet another sad Geniza tale—as his critical contribution to the trove’s retrieval was, for years, kept hidden. (He was also barely paid for his work.) According to Nicholson, the Bodleian librarian, “absolute secrecy as to the Cairo fragments was, for the time being,