The Twins and the Scholar

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This year marks the 100th anniversary of one of the most famous letters in the history of Biblical scholarship:

With this rushed note, the talmudic scholar Solomon Schechter informed Agnes Lewis and her twin sister Margaret Gibson that they had discovered part of the long-lost original text of the Wisdom of Ben Sira (in Latin, Ecclesiasticus). Considered canonical by Catholics, this early second-century B.C.E. book just missed inclusion in the Hebrew Bible.¹ The text remained popular among Jews nonetheless: The Talmud and other rabbinic writings quote it more than 80 times, occasionally with the introduction “it is written,” generally 056reserved for quotations from the Bible. But because Ben Sira was not included in the Hebrew canon, the original text of this guide to moral and ethical behavior eventually disappeared; the quotations scattered throughout the Talmud and other rabbinical literature became the only passages known in their original language.² Until Schechter dashed off his note, only later Greek, Syriac and Latin translations preserved by the Christian church were thought to remain.

The twins’ discovery led Schechter to a fabulous hoard of manuscripts (including what came to be known as “the first Dead Sea Scroll”) and recast the study of what Israeli archaeologist Yigael Yadin described as “perhaps one of the most important scrolls for the study of Jewish and Hebrew literature of the Second Temple period.”³

Just a few months before Schechter wrote to Lewis and Gibson, in early spring 1896, the wealthy Scottish sisters had journeyed to Cairo and Jerusalem hoping to purchase Biblical manuscripts.⁴ Devoted to Biblical scholarship and travel, they had already met with great success in the library of St. Catherine’s monastery in Sinai, where they discovered a palimpsest^a of a fifth-century fragment of the Gospels and took 1,000 photos of ancient writings. Agnes Lewis later recorded that although she and her sister passed through Cairo quickly to avoid a quarantine, they managed to obtain a bundle of fragments that Margaret Gibson packed in the bottom of a trunk, beneath “fancy creations of French millinery art,” and sent on to Beirut.

After a grueling camel ride across the desert to Jerusalem, the sisters spent four rainy weeks photographing manuscripts in the library of the Greek monastery attached to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and in the Syrian convent. Neither collection, they determined, held anything comparable to their Sinai discoveries.

They left Jerusalem with a Hebrew manuscript of the Pentateuch and a pile of fragments, similar to those purchased in Cairo, from a dealer in the Sharon Plain. Rain prohibited their traveling to Beirut, where the bundle of Cairo fragments lay in a customs house, so they had the trunk sent from Beirut to Jaffa. Jaffa customs officials, Agnes Lewis later wrote, might have impounded the fragments if their traveling companion hadn’t taken advantage of a law exempting the Bible and Koran from confiscation. “Do you not see that these are Hebrew?” he asked the officials. “The ladies say their prayers in Hebrew. Do you want to prevent them saying their prayers?”

Returning in early May to their Cambridge mansion, Castlebrae, the sisters began to examine their treasures and develop their photos. Margaret Gibson quickly identified all the fragments from the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament. The rest, which they assumed to be talmudic or private Jewish documents, they decided to show to their friend Solomon Schechter, Cambridge University’s Reader 057in Talmudic Literature. On May 13, Agnes Lewis ran into Schechter on King’s Parade, Cambridge’s fashionable shopping district, and asked him to come inspect their finds. He was apparently excited by the invitation—when Lewis arrived home from her morning excursion, Schechter was already in her dining room, examining the two collections of fragments.

He held up a vellum leaf, saying, “This is part of the Jerusalem Talmud, which is very rare. May I take it away?”

“Certainly,” Lewis said.

Then he held up a dirty scrap of paper from the pack of Cairo fragments. “This, too, is very interesting. May I take it away and identify it?” “May I publish it?”

Lewis replied, “Mrs. Gibson and I will only be too happy if you find that it is worth publishing.”

Schechter hurried off to the university library to consult an English Apocrypha (which the Puritan sisters 058did not own). Before lunchtime the same day, Schechter’s note, identifying the fragment as “the original Hebrew of Ecclesiasticus,” arrived from the library. Rushing home from the library, Schechter boasted to his wife, “As long as the Bible lives, my name shall not die.”

That evening, on Schechter’s request, Agnes Lewis sent a notice to the Athenaeum, a London literary chronicle, about Schechter’s “discovery” of an 11th-century copy of the ancient Hebrew text of Ben Sira, chapters 39:15–40:8. Alerted by this news, librarians at Oxford University began to scour their recent acquisitions, and on June 27th, a second notice appeared in the Athenaeum, announcing that Adolphe Neubauer and Sir Arthur Ernest Cowley of the Bodleian Library had found the nine following leaves—in far superior condition—of the same manuscript of Ben Sira. These too had been purchased from Cairo dealers in early spring, by the Bible scholar and Oxford professor Archibald Henry Sayce.^b Schechter published the Lewis-Gibson fragment in an article in the July 1896 issue of the Expositor, and Neubauer and Cowley published all ten leaves as a single volume in January 1897.⁵

In his article, Schechter speculated that the Gibson-Lewis fragment came from a manuscript containing all 51 chapters of Ben Sira in Hebrew. “The significance of the fragment consists, then, not only in what it offers, but also in the hope that it holds out to us of fresh finds.” He was further convinced that the various Ben Sira fragments beginning to surface throughout England all came from the same source. Fragments from a Cairo manuscript hoard had been floating through dealers to Oxford University, Cambridge University, the British Museum and private collections for years, but their provenance remained uncertain until Schechter discovered a clue among the Hebrew fragments purchased by the sisters: Several were marked with the word “Fostat,” the name for Old Cairo.

Fostat was home to a thriving Jewish community in the 11th and 12th centuries, when Egypt was under 059Islamic rule. The renowned Jewish theologian and philosopher Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon, known as the Rambam or Maimonides (1135–1204), either lived or stopped there in his travels. The Ben Ezra Synagogue,^c where Maimonides worshiped and taught in Fostat, was rebuilt in 1892 on the medieval synagogue’s foundations.⁶ In Schechter’s time, travelers, manuscript hunters and scholars were aware that the Ben Ezra Synagogue contained a genizah, or repository for worn-out copies of sacred writings.^d After seeing the twins’ fragment, Schechter talked with the London lawyer and bibliophile Elkan Adler, who told him he had received a batch of fragments from the Fostat synagogue authorities—apparently Adler was allowed to remove as many documents as he could carry in a Torah mantle. Schechter surmised that the twins’ and the Bodleian fragments of Ben Sira, as well as the numerous other ancient fragments from Cairo, all came from the Cairo Genizah.

Hoping to discover the rest of the Ben Sira manuscript and to claim the entire contents of the genizah for Cambridge University, Schechter set out to Cairo in December 1896.⁷ His trip was a secret mission taken on behalf of the university’s library and paid for, in part, by Charles Taylor, a mathematician, Christian Hebraist and Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge. Schechter carried with him a recommendation from the chief rabbi of England to the chief rabbi of Cairo and a letter from Cambridge University to Cairo’s Jewish leaders.

Gaining entrance to the genizah required tact and persuasion—the chief rabbi of Cairo and the beadles who oversaw the genizah were reluctant to part with their fragments, which, sold piece by piece, had provided the synagogue with a steady source of income. Schechter reported to his wife his successes in gaining their confidence. After he “flirted … for hours” with the rabbi’s adviser, he took the chief rabbi on his first trip to the pyramids. Schechter wrote, “It will cost me about 060ten shillings, but that is the only way to make yourself popular.” And finally, acceptance: “The Rabbi is very kind to me and kisses me on my mouth, which is not very pleasant.” Apparently, Schechter’s assurance that a transfer to a university library would best preserve the texts won him over.⁸ The Chief Rabbi authorized him to take “what, and as much as, [he] liked.”

Entering the genizah also required bravery and agility. Legend told of a great snake that protected the genizah’s narrow entrance, reached by a rickety ladder that leaned against the end wall of the women’s gallery in the synagogue. After plunging through this hole into the attic chamber, Schechter wrote, he had to “swallow the dust of centuries which nearly suffocated and blinded me.” Inside he found “a battlefield of books, and the literary productions of many centuries had their share in the battle … Some of the belligerents have perished outright, and are literally ground to dust in the terrible struggle for space, whilst others … are squeezed into big, unshapely lumps, which … can no longer be separated without serious damage.” “The manuscripts are numbered by the thousands,” Schechter determined. “It is impossible to examine them here.” He decided “to take everything [he] could.” Within a month, Schechter had 30 bags containing 140,000 of the genizah’s oldest fragments. Quoting Exodus 12:36, he wrote: “The work was done thoroughly, as it is written: ‘And they have despoiled the Egyptians.’” Schechter and his sponsor, Charles Taylor, offered all the material to Cambridge University Library, where it remains today.

Back at Cambridge, wearing a dust coat and nose and mouth protector, Schechter sifted through the fragments, peering at them through his magnifying glass and then distributing them among wooden grocery-store boxes labeled “Bible,” “Talmud,” “History,” 061“Literature,” “Philosophy,” “Rabbinics” and “Theology.” He soon found seven more leaves from the medieval copy of Ben Sira, which he and Taylor published in 1899.⁹ In his preface to the volume, Taylor noted that the new Hebrew manuscript restores allusions lost or obscured in translations. The authorized version of the Bible, Taylor explained, translated Ben Sira 3:8 as “My son, in word and in deed honour thy father; that a blessing may come upon thee from them.” The Speakers Commentary corrects this translation: “My son, in word and in deed honour thy father; that a blessing may come upon thee from him.” But the original Hebrew fragment translates “My son, in word and in deed honour thy father; that a blessing may overtake thee.” It quotes, in part, Deuteronomy 28:2: “and all these blessings shall come upon thee, and overtake thee”—a subtlety long lost in Christian translations.

One of the longest of the apocryphal or canonical books, the Wisdom of Ben Sira was written around 180 B.C.E. by Yeshua ben Eleazar ben Sira, a Jewish scribe who had a school in Jerusalem. The Wisdom of Ben Sira lists moral sayings, folk proverbs, psalms of praise and lament, theological and philosophical reflections, homiletic exhortations, and observations about life and customs. In his book, which he modeled on the Book of Proverbs, Ben Sira offered his contemporaries a guide to moral behavior. The text, writes Alexander Di Lella, professor of Biblical studies at Catholic University, “fully reflects the mentality of second-century B.C. Palestinian Judaism—its limitations and its grandeur.”¹⁰

The text of Ben Sira, Taylor and Schechter noted, provides a crucial link between the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic writings. “The author belonged to a period which did not write scripture but imitated scripture, and freely adapted Bible thoughts and phrases.”¹¹ Ben Sira quotes every book of the Hebrew Bible except Daniel. By developing and expanding scripture into instructive lessons, the author employs the interpretive techniques that rabbis used.¹²

A handful of skeptics claimed, however, that the Cairo Ben Sira was a medieval translation from Greek, Syriac or Persian into Hebrew, and thus not a close record of the original text.¹³ Their argument, hotly disputed in Schechter’s time, was put to rest more than half a century later, in the mid-1960s, when Yigael Yadin discovered at Masada 26 leather fragments forming seven columns of the Wisdom of Ben Sira—dating to the first half of the first century B.C.E. “The text in the Cairo Geniza,” Yadin wrote, “on the whole represents the original Ben-Sira Hebrew text.” Abbé Maurice Baillet identified two fragments of Ben Sira, containing only four complete words and a handful of letters and dating to the second half of the first century B.C.E., from Qumran Cave 2. Published in 1962, these fragments too “show a textual form practically identical with that of the manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza.”¹⁴ Yadin suggested that the text of Ben Sira and other Dead Sea Scrolls may have reached the Ben Ezra Synagogue 062following an early-ninth-century discovery of scrolls on the shores of the Dead Sea, recorded in a letter from Timotheus I, patriarch of Seleucia.¹⁵

A link between the Judean desert caves of Qumran and Masada and the Cairo synagogue is definite. Two of the most treasured of Schechter’s genizah finds are medieval copies of the Dead Sea Scroll known as the Damascus Document, which relates the history of and gives many laws for a second-century B.C.E. Jewish sect (perhaps the Essenes) that opposed the religious leaders in Jerusalem.^e Schechter’s study of the document, which he called the Zadokite Document, led him to speculate that the sect must have possessed a manual of rules. Fifty years later, the Qumran caves revealed fragments of at least eight copies of the Damascus Document and at least eleven copies of the sect’s Manual of Disciple, dating from the first century B.C.E.

One hundred years after Margaret Gibson unwittingly tucked a scrap of Ben Sira in her trunk in Cairo, the fragment, along with the 140,000 fragments Solomon Schechter brought back from the Cairo Genizah, are the nucleus of an active research center for Hebraists at the Cambridge University Library. Since 1973, Stefan Reif, director of the library’s Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, and his staff have been cataloguing, cleaning and preserving the fragments. Today, all the fragments have been conserved and are available to scholars; about half have been published in 10 catalogues containing scholarly descriptions of each piece. Reif’s goal: to make “everything available to everybody” by digitizing the fragments and putting them on-line. The only impediment is funding; the project requires approximately $3,000,000. Until then, the public is invited to view a selection of the fragments in person as the genizah material goes on tour in 1997. In celebration of the 100th anniversary of Schechter’s donation of the documents to the library, about 50 fragments will be exhibited at the Jewish Museum in New York, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and Cambridge University.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of one of the most famous letters in the history of Biblical scholarship:

University Library, Cambridge
May 13, 1896

Dear Mrs. Lewis,