Adas Library Reviews

Solomon Schechter

Dr. Schechter quickly realized that the unimpressive-looking scrap (which Mrs. Gibson said looked "as if a grocer had used it for something greasy") was from the long-lost Hebrew text of the Apocryphal book of Ben Sira, known for centuries only in Greek translation. Electrified, Schechter set off to explore the source of the fragment, an attic in the ancient Ben Ezra Synagogue of Fustat (Old Cairo).

Crammed with hundreds of years of discarded papers, the attic was a genizah, a storage chamber, for Hebrew texts bearing the name of God (too sacred to be destroyed, under Jewish law) and myriad cast-off documents pertaining to the Jewish community. The dry climate had protected the documents over the centuries, as did legends about an ancient curse and a poisonous snake guarding the genizah.

Amid the dusty debris, Schechter discovered a lost civilization. The papers in the genizah richly depicted centuries of everyday Jewish life. In addition to sacred texts, haggadot, and rabbinic rulings, the genizah contained marriage contracts, wills, shop inventories, court depositions, business receipts, medical prescriptions, poetry, and love letters. One treasure buried in the genizah was correspondence belonging to Maimonides, who in the 12th Century had lived a short distance from the synagogue.

Eager to study and preserve these historic finds, Schechter courted the Grand Rabbi and lay leaders of Cairo's Jewish community over cigarettes and innumerable cups of coffee, winning permission to ship most of the genizah cache to England.