The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

REIF The Cairo Genizah and its Treasures 35
made possible a reconstruction of daily Jewish life in the
Mediterranean area during the Fatimid period. Remarkably it is
thanks to unscrupulous synagogal officials that such a development has
taken place. Their love of 'baksheesh' in the latter part of the nineteenth
century led them to sell items from the Genizah to scholarly
visitors and dealers and thus it came about that famous libraries in
St Petersburg, Paris, London, Oxford, Cambridge and New York
ultimately each acquired thousands of fragments and other institutions
also took smaller shares of the spoil. 13 Inspired by his dealings with
Rabbi Solomon Aaron Wertheimer in Jerusalem and by the purchases
of his Scottish Presbyterian friends, Mrs Agnes Lewis and Mrs
Margaret Gibson, and encouraged by the Master of St John's College,
Dr Charles Taylor, and the University Librarian, Mr Francis
Jenkinson, the Reader in Talmudic Literature at the University of
Cambridge, Dr Solomon Schechter, made a famous journey to Cairo
in the winter of 1896-97 to investigate the precise source of the fragments
that had been arriving from Egypt. Having located it in the
Ben-Ezra Synagogue, he persuaded the Chief Rabbi of Cairo, Rabbi
Aaron Raphael Bensimon, to allow him to remove 140,000 items to
Cambridge and thereby to create a centre for Genizah scholarship in
that distinguished and ancient English university. 14
Before the discovery of the Genizah material there had been two
main reasons for the relative neglect on the part of Western learning
13. Solomon Schechter's letter of 12 January 1897 to Francis Jenkinson
(Cambridge University Library, MS Add.6463.3416) sums up a situation that must
have applied for a number of years before his visit: 'The beadel and other infernal
scoundrels are helping me to clear away the rubbish and the printed matter. I have
constantly to bakeshish them, but still they are stealing many good things and sell
them to the dealers in antiquities. I cannot possibly prevent it, but I found out the said
dealers and bought from them the fragments which have interest for me.'
14. S.C. Reif, A Guide to the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection (Cambridge,
1973, 1979); 'Genizah Collections at Cambridge University Library', in Te'uda, I
(Hebrew) (ed. M.A. Friedman; Tel Aviv, 1980), pp. 201-206; Published Material
from the Cambridge Genizah Collections: A Bibliography 1896-1980 (Cambridge,
1988), introduction; 'Cairo Genizah Material at Cambridge University Library',
Bulletin of the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo 12 (1989), pp. 29-34; 'Jenkinson
and Schechter at Cambridge: An Expanded and Updated Assessment', Transactions
of the Jewish Historical Society of England 32 (1992), pp. 243-80; The Genizah
Collection', in Researching the Jewish Heritage (ed. T. Kushner; Leicester,
forthcoming).