Between Private and Public: Writing a Memoir of Raphael and Myself

Let me start with a photograph. A year ago in last December on the afternoon before the Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture, which was given by Sally Alexander, my husband John and I visited an exhibition at the British Museum, 'Egypt: Faith after the Pharaohs'. Among the exhibits was a photograph of Professor Solomon Schechter, a scholar of ancient languages and Hebraic texts. (Fig. 1) He is sitting in a dark corner of the Cambridge University Library, at a wooden trestle table, head bent, leaning on his hand, examining a scrap of manuscript. Around him, on other tables and in sacks, are swirling, teetering piles of what looks like rubbish. And it is. Greasy, dirty and apparently smelling to high heaven. From the Cairo Geniza (storeroom) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat or Old Cairo.

Genizot are temporary repositories for worn-out Hebrew language books and papers – Jewish custom forbids the throwing away of writings containing the name of God: they are honoured by being kept to decay at their own rate. Of course, a personal letter may also begin with a conventional invocation, as would a marriage document or a will or a merchant's bill of sale. Genizot materials were periodically gathered and usually buried, though not in Cairo, where discarded writings were stored and the Geniza became a giant wastepaper basket of what turned out to be 300,000 manuscript fragments dating from the tenth to the nineteenth century: religious works, poetry, drafts by the revered medieval philosopher Maimonides, children's school primers, magical amulets, medical prescriptions, business dealings, including those with Muslim partners, and a mountain of other ephemera. In the 1890s Solomon Schechter explored the Geniza and took materials to Cambridge where they eventually became an archive. The exhibition told us that the fragments were absolutely priceless, unique and crucial in revealing a continuous history of the Jews, living alongside Muslims and Christians in a multi-faith Egypt across the centuries.¹

Looking at this image I found myself unaccountably stricken, suddenly in tears. In part I was moved by the sheer scale of the task Schechter had set himself, an epic struggle against oblivion. Yet my distress seemed out of proportion. After all, I might have found the photograph comical or inspiring. Thinking about it later, I realized that it called to mind another image, which many of you will know, of Raphael Samuel in his study. (Fig. 2) More than anyone I ever met, Raphael also dedicated his life to learning from all those scraps of the past which give substance to memory, and which allow the dead to speak to us – the historian's task. And of course, when I saw that photograph of Schechter, I was about to attend the memorial lecture, and I was also in the British Museum, in that twilit atrium containing the spectral circular space of the old British Library, where many of us once worked. It's especially haunted for me by Raphael's ghost. I often met him there, unearthing him from his seat or digging him out of the North Gallery, where he was usually hidden behind stacks of books, papers spilling out of bags. Raphael was always in the middle of a Herculean task and several deadlines at once; as he was when he died twenty years ago. The unfinishedness of the work like those fragments on Schechter's table – 'disjecta membra' – scattered leaves or limbs – were for me an image of the untimeliness of his death. But also perhaps a momento mori: we all die in medias res.

Fig 1.

Professor Solomon Schechter, a scholar of ancient languages and Hebraic texts, working in Cambridge University Library on material from the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo.

Schecter's Jewishness resonated too. Books and scholarship were Raphael's lifeblood. His mother's father, Yacov Nirenstein had run a religious bookshop in Wentworth Street, off Brick Lane in Spitalfields; Yacov and his wife Feigel had come from a small shtetl in Byelorussia and Ukraine at the turn of the century...