Sacred Trash by Adina Hoffman Read Free Book Online Page B

in Agnes and Margaret’s dining room that spring day, had dashed off a postcard to his difficult friend to tell him the thrilling news. After two weeks of pregnant silence, Schechter received a letter from Neubauer saying that the postcard was illegible. At the same time, Neubauer let it be known that he and his younger Oxford colleague A. E. Cowley just happened to have discovered nine leaves of Ben Sira in the Oxford collection! (“It is natural for us to think,” mused Agnes Lewis, “that [the notice of Schechter’sfind] was of some assistance in guiding Messrs. Neubauer and Cowley to this important result.”) Mathilde was more direct and declared that “for a long time he [Neubauer] could not forgive Dr. Schechter. He was very bitter about many things.” That was the end of the friendship.
    Now the race to get the Geniza was really on, and in October of 1896, Sayce wrote to d’Hulst: “I have persuaded the University to send Dr. Neubauer out to Cairo, since being a Jew he may be better able to get the MSS from the Jews than we are.” Rumors were afoot that Elkan Adler had been in Cairo and had purchased certain manuscripts, and Sayce was eager to beat him to the rest.
    But as we have heard, Neubauer already knew about Adler’s Geniza finds, and though he had earlier berated the London lawyer for “not carrying the whole lot away,” Neubauer now turned rather abruptly on his heel, declared Adler’s fragments “a lot of worthless rubbish,” and decided not to make the trip.
    Was he too weary to go? Too cheap? (Adler had, it seems, committed a cardinal sin in Neubauer’s eyes and “paid high prices” for his haul of useless trash.) Did he prefer to stay home and rummage for other Ben Sira fragments in the Bodleian collection? Or did he consider the ripped and dirty jumble of unsorted odds and ends that Adler had showed him—and the others that Sayce and d’Hulst had recently boxed up and shipped to the Bodleian—somehow beneath Oxford, which had long prided itself on obtaining valuable literary manuscripts in excellent condition, preferably more complete quires, in fine scribal hands? We may never really know—though one thing at least is sure: with that small but fateful failure of the imagination, the learned, lonely Adolf Neubauer lost all claims to the Geniza stash and, in this respect, to posterity.

All Sirach Now
    W hy Ben Sira? What drew Schechter into the spell of those fragments that May afternoon in the Giblews’ dining room? What notions were kindling the glitter in his eyes that Margaret had seen when Schechter asked if he might take the leaf of Ben Sira home for inspection? His own pronouncements about the find never confront the question of motivation, at least not directly, and so in following out this psychic thread we are, to an unnerving extent, searching among shadows. Only in that half-light, however, do we stand a chance of discovering what it was about the seventeen “badly mutilated” lines of verse from the second century B.C.E . that roused the Romanian scholar and caused him to orchestrate, on the sly, his Indiana Jones–like expedition to Egypt.
    In all probability, it wasn’t the idea of the Geniza itself.
    For at least a decade and a half Schechter had been working intensively with Hebrew manuscripts at the British Museum in London and in close proximity to Neubauer at Oxford’s Bodleian Library—“the promised land of the Hebrew scholar,” as he put it in an 1888 article. And for six of those years he had been at Cambridge, which held the “Egyptian fragments” that Shelomo Wertheimer had been selling to the university since the early nineties. By all accounts, Schechter was devoted to this work and, once he arrived at Cambridge, to the Hebraica housedin the library at what was known as the Old Schools. He was often there on the Jewish Sabbath, and the head librarian’s diary entries from the pre-Geniza years registerSchechter’s ongoing engagement with the