Solomon Schechter שלמה זלמן שכטר

He grew up in a hasidic house, studied in Vienna and Berlin and settled in England—an ordinary path for that century, though it rarely ended like this.

How it began. In 5656 two Scotswomen, the sisters Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, brought back from Egypt some leaves bought there by chance and showed them to Schechter. He recognised the Hebrew text of the book of Ben Sira—a book known for two thousand years only in Greek. Then he asked where the leaf had come from.

Cairo. In December of that year he came to Fustat, to the Ben Ezra synagogue, obtained the community's permission and carried off the contents of the genizah—nearly two hundred thousand leaves—on the money of Charles Taylor, Master of St John's College. The Cambridge collection bears both their names.

What was found there. Besides Ben Sira: the Damascus Document, whose meaning became clear only half a century later, when the Judean Desert scrolls were found; drafts and letters in Rambam's own hand; thousands of letters of Jewish merchants who sailed to India; marriage contracts, bills of divorce, children's exercise books.

And honestly. The removal of the manuscripts from Cairo to Cambridge is judged in different ways today, and the question is a fair one: a rescue or a taking. Both sides are worth knowing. Schechter himself later went to America and headed the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.