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the young Wertheimer was known around town as an expert bibliophile, and so he received frequent visits from other dealers and suppliers who brought him manuscripts for inspection and possible purchase. One of these was a so-called emissary, referred to by Wertheimer’s latter-day descendants simply as “the Yemenite,” a man whom Wertheimer had dispatched to Egypt to buy manuscripts on his behalf. The Yemenite seems to have made several trips, returning with fragmentsthat Wertheimer then set out to sell to the librarians at Cambridge and Oxford, to whom he announced in a series of letters and postcards—written mostly in English, but sometimes in German or (to Schechter) in Hebrew—that they came from “one of the Genizas of old Egypt.”

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    Wertheimer’s English in these missives was flawed but expressive (he addresses one note to “The Magnificent University Library”), his tone polite yet urgent—though this seems to have been more a function of financial need than any compulsion to convince his European customers of the importance of the manuscript’s source. “I also come to let you know,” he wrote, “that an Ancient ‘ Sefer-Tora ’ found in one of the ‘ Geniza ’ [ sic ] of Cairo (Egypt) written on leather of Roebuck ‘’ should you require, let me know soon.” In fact, given the monumental nature of the discovery he was more or less announcing to two of the world’s great libraries, it is striking that much of the correspondence preserved in the archives consists of wrangling about postal rates: “Is it right that I should pay when your good & kind self promised me that you will send it by Registered post direct to me without my paying anything?” From 1894 to 1896 Wertheimer sold 62 Geniza manuscripts to Cambridge and some 239 items to Oxford, though just as much of the material he offered was probably sent back as was kept. One list preserved in the Cambridge files shows the piddling sums Wertheimer received for various manuscripts, of which at least some, it seems plain now, came from the Geniza; others in the same batch were marked by the librarian (whose diary indicates that he consulted with Schechter aboutthese possible acquisitions) “not wanted,” “not wanted at all,” or simply “worthless.”

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    But the contribution Wertheimer made to the gradual uncovering of the Geniza went beyond mere sales: he was the very first to knowingly transcribe and publish texts from the Geniza, and though later scholars would refer a bit dismissively to this work as “somewhat unscientific,” he was, we might say, the founding father of Geniza studies. As significantly, he was also the first to make explicit mention in a publication of the existence of the trove. In an important 1893 Hebrew book of hitherto little-known rabbinical commentaries, he made conscious reference to the source of the manuscript with which he was working: it “comes from the old Geniza … in the land of Egypt,” he announced, and he would go on to publish other volumes filled with a rich range of material from the Geniza—including more unknown midrash, rabbinic responsa, and liturgical poems. The wide scope of Geniza documents he put up for sale to Cambridge—everything from Judeo-Spanish poetry collections to marriage contracts to legal deeds to the seventh-century Apocalypse of Zerubbabel to medical tracts to letters to Passover hymns—also indicates a keen understanding of the vast and eclectic potential of the cache.
    Yet decades later he would look back with more than a little bitterness at the fact that his own role in the recovery of the Geniza had been occluded. “It was I who made known to the world the importance of this Geniza, and other scholars and students came after me and,” he complained, rather biblically, “despoiled Egypt of the Geniza manuscripts and brought to light many things from among them and earned fame throughout the world for