Sacred Trash by Adina Hoffman Page B

fragments they found there. (Margaret would later describe how they returned to the same neighborhood and shops where they had beenregular customers for several years and had bought the original Ben Sira page. “We have no doubt whatever … that these … had come from this Genizah without the cognizance of the Grand Rabbi.” It seems Mrs. Lewis’s original announcement that the Ben Sira scrap had come from Palestine had been meant to throw the academic competition off the scent.) They also bought a leather portmanteau in which to pack these purchases, and, “as there is no particular satisfaction in importing dirt,” set about cleaning the manuscripts in their hotel room. Agnes performed this task with what she described as “great eagerness,” since “every scrap that I detached from its neighbours might possibly have been concealing another leaf of the Hebrew Ecclesiasticus, but in this I was disappointed. They were so wet that I had to spread them out on trunks and tables in the sunlight to dry, removing a quantity of sticky treacle-like stuff with bits of paper which I afterwards destroyed.”
    Schechter, meanwhile, was grateful for their company (“They are very friendly and in no way intrusive,” he wrote Mathilde) if a bit skeptical about the results of their shopping trips. (“I think that they have bought the things which I have declined to buy from the dealers, for I have only bought what seemed to me important.” That said, once back home he did arrange to buy several sacks of fragments from a dealer named Raffalovich, who shipped them to Cambridge, where—after a session of sorting with Schechter—Jenkinson declared the contents “very poor stuff.”) And he continued to work—tussling with the beadle till the very end about how deep to dig in the heap of paper and vellum—and on January 28, he announced that he had “finally finished the big Geniza. I have emptied all.” By the last day of the month “about a hundred thousand” fragments had been packed into “8 big wooden cases” and were ready to be shipped. (In fact more recent counts show the tally closer to 190,000 pieces.) He was, he told Mathilde, “anxious that they would go away from here for in the last days some began to grumble that I take away so much etc.”
    He planned to wait another week or so before setting out to visit hisbrother in Palestine. Even though the Geniza crates had already been sent off to England, he wanted, he wrote, to stay in town to keep an eye on “the thieves” to see whether they “will throw on the market things they stole from me.” In the meantime, he invited Agnes and Margaret to tea to meet the rabbi, had another meal with the Cattauis (who packed him a kosher basket to take on his trip), and ate dinner again with the rabbi, “with the usual consequence of indigestion.” But for all his sarcasm, Schechter still knew enough to be extremely grateful: “These people are so kind that they are worth some inconvenience.”

Sorting
    C louds and sun, with a westerly wind, were recorded neatly in Francis Jenkinson’s diary on May 11, 1897, as was the “squall of rain & hail” that burst out in Cambridge that evening. On this particular Tuesday, the meteorologically hypersensitive and headache-prone university librarian—a devoted amateur botanist, entomologist, bird-watcher, and chamber music enthusiast—also noted the peppermint geranium he’d given a friend, mentioned the recovery from influenza of a well-known literary critic he’d happened to meet on his way to work, and, without veering from the same even script and tone, reported: “Began unpacking the first box of Hebrew fragm[en]ts, most anxious stuff.”
    Most anxious indeed. Although Jenkinson remains tactfully closemouthed in his journal about the particulars of what went on that afternoon—noting simply: “Hurried lunch & back by 2.0: Schechter, Ma[ste]r of St. John’s [Charles Taylor], Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson set to