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 theopen. 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 every 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 samecourtyard 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.”)
( Photo Credit 2.5 )
Some of the scraps dumped out in the Ben Ezra courtyard would wind up in the hands of people with a deeper and more immediate understanding than Cyrus Adler of their true origin and worth. Born in 1866 in Slovakia, the Jerusalem rabbi and independent scholar Shelomo Aharon Wertheimer, for instance, supported his large, poor family by buying and selling manuscripts. In the overgrown village that was 1890s Jerusalem,
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 theopen. 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 every 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 samecourtyard 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.”)
( Photo Credit 2.5 )
Some of the scraps dumped out in the Ben Ezra courtyard would wind up in the hands of people with a deeper and more immediate understanding than Cyrus Adler of their true origin and worth. Born in 1866 in Slovakia, the Jerusalem rabbi and independent scholar Shelomo Aharon Wertheimer, for instance, supported his large, poor family by buying and selling manuscripts. In the overgrown village that was 1890s Jerusalem,
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