Sacred Trash by Adina Hoffman Read Free Book Online Page A

necessary to the interests of the Library.” While this excuse might sound reasonable, it was offered grudgingly, and only after d’Hulsthad taken to writing lengthy (sixteen-to-twenty-page) screeds in which he hounded the Oxford authorities, declaiming, for instance, “For me, it [the omission of his name in connection to the finds] is not a question of mere vanity but of justice, and having been repeatedly treated unjustly it has become a question of principle.” And elsewhere, more wrenchingly: “you have not to look back as I have upon a life ruined and embittered by ingratitude & disgraceful behaviour in return for services rendered.” A “pronounced Anglophile,” in his own terms, he was imprisoned in Egypt during World War I as an enemy alien, and soon after died of malaria, impoverished and unknown. The full extent of his role in retrieving Geniza manuscripts was only uncovered in 2008 by a tenacious young Cambridge scholar.
    It wasn’t, though, just the buried fragments that were now being excavated: the entire Geniza was, in a sense, up for grabs. In an 1895 letter to Neubauer, the Assyriologist, collector, and regular traveler to Egypt A. H. Sayce (who had, through d’Hulst, been steadily supplying Oxford with Geniza manuscripts) claimed that “the Jews in charge of the place have offered to sell the whole collection for £50 with £5 bakshish [the equivalent of some $5,000 in today’s currency]. But the difficulty is how to get such a large quantity of things out of the country. Could the Bodleian get the government or rather Lord Cromer [the British consul general of Egypt] to do it?” There were other obstacles too. “The three heads of the community are selling [the manuscripts],” wrote Sayce to Neubauer in a letter a few days later, “but as the one with whom the bargain was made is perpetually drunk it has been very difficult to get it completed.”
    For whatever reason, the plans for this sale fell through—and soon afterward, in early January of 1896, Elkan Adler returned to Cairo, where, after making a probably ample “donation,” he was, as he later wrote, “conducted by [Cairo Chief] Rabbi Rafail [ben Shimon] to the extreme end of the ladies’ gallery, permitted to climb to the topmost rung of a ladder, to enter the secret chamber of the Genizah through a hole in thewall, and to take away with me a sackful of paper and parchment writing—as much in fact as I could gather up in the three or four hours I was permitted to linger there.”
    Upon his return to England, Adler announced his discovery to Neubauer and Schechter. “The first rated me soundly for not carrying the whole lot away, the second admired my continence but was not foolish enough to follow my example.”
    Or, as he put it elsewhere, “Neubauer was very angry with me for not ransacking the whole Genizah. I told him that my conscience, which was tenderer then than now, reproached me for having taken away what I did, but he said that science knows no law.”
    Those were fighting words for such a proper gentleman. Neubauer must have felt himself a bit frenzied as he drew closer and closer to the Geniza stash: he had acquired a valuable, if small, trove of manuscripts already, and it was just a matter of time before he would somehow seize hold of the whole thing for the Bodleian. This may not have been a matter of purely “scientific” interest; he was, according to Mathilde Schechter, “of a very jealous nature” and seems not to have taken kindly to the momentous May 1896 announcement that Cambridge’s own Dr. Schechter had discovered a leaf of the long-lost Hebrew Book of Ben Sira. Never mind that Neubauer had plenty of other scholarly fish to fry and that he had, until now, evinced only a passing interest in the apocryphal book: word of Schechter’s find seems to have driven him around the competitive bend. Schechter, for his part, was brimming with excitement and, immediately upon identifying the ancient scrap