Jack followed Aysha into a maze of narrow cobbled alleys and high stone walls, of men in fez caps and galabiya robes, reminiscent of the Old City of Jerusalem. He remembered that it was to Egypt as well as Spain that many of the Jews who escaped the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70 had fled, and there had been other Jews in Alexandria involved in trade with India even before that.
A bearded beggar sat at the entrance to the synagogue precinct, and Jack tossed him a few coins. Then he followed Aysha into the building itself, through the doorway and onto the gray marble floor of the main open space, which was mottled in pools of white where it was lit up by hanging lamps. Above him, on either side, upper-floor balconies ran the length of the building. They were faced with pillared colonnades of little arches painted in alternating white and red that would not have looked out of place in the courtyard of a Cairo mosque. Not for the first time, Jack reflected on the intermeshing of Judaeo-Christian and Muslim culture in the Near East, so at odds with the polarization created by politics and extremism.
Aysha motioned for him to stay while she quickly ran up the stairs to the left-hand gallery. She disappeared behind a section at the far end that had been cordoned off with hanging shrouds lit up from within. He could hear low voices, hers and another he recognized as Maria’s, but he blocked them out for a moment and breathed in deeply, enjoying the smell of old stone and wood after the smog outside. He was relishing the tranquillity he always found in old churches and mosques and synagogues in the middle of bustling cities, a precious respite from the cloud of uncertainty that hung over Cairo.
He was fascinated to be in the Ben Ezra synagogue at last, the source of the Cairo Geniza, the greatest collection of medieval documents to be discovered anywhere in recent times. In most synagogues the geniza chambers were cleared out periodically and their contents buried in cemeteries, whereas the geniza in the Ben Ezra synagogue appeared to contain everything that had been put into it from its inception in the ninth century. When the geniza was first studied, it proved to contain not only thousands of pages of sacred writings — biblical, Talmudic, rabbinical, even fragments of the Qur’ān — but also a trove of secular material, documents in Aramaic and Arabic as well as Hebrew that preserved an extraordinary picture of Jewish life in Egypt in the medieval period. When Jack had first pored over those documents as a student at Cambridge, he had seen the collection with an archaeologist’s eye, much as if he were looking at the evidence of an excavation. The geniza fragments seemed all the more valuable because, like Hiebermeyer’s papyrus mummy wrappings, they were writings that had not been selected by scholars or religious authorities for preservation, and they revealed details of day-to-day life that so rarely survived in written records before modern times.
The hanging shroud on the upper floor parted, and Aysha stood at the balustrade of the balcony. “Okay, Jack. Maria’s nearly ready. What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking how pleased I am that Solomon Schechter over a century ago arranged for the bulk of the archive to go to Cambridge University. I hate to think what the extremists would do to this place.”
“If they were true Muslims, they’d leave it alone. Moses was one of our prophets too, and to Muslims the Jews are People of the Book, those to whom scripture has been divinely revealed. Did you know that the baby Moses was supposedly found at this spot, in the reeds in a tributary of the Nile that ran just behind this place?”
Jack walked toward the stairs. “Nice story, but it was two thousand — odd years between the Exodus and the reemergence of the Jewish community in medieval Cairo. It’s hard to believe that anyone would have remembered the exact spot. Also there’s a lot of uncertainty about what was going on in the New Kingdom period where Fustat now lies, and whether there was a settlement or perhaps some kind of temple establishment. The site for the story is more likely somewhere north in the marshlands of the Nile Delta, good papyrus country.”
Aysha stood with her hands on her hips. “What about that famous Jack Howard leap of faith? Maurice says that’s your biggest asset.”
“Faith in my instinct, not in every old legend,” Jack said, mounting the stairs and grinning at her. “Anyway, I’m being Lanowski. Where’s the hard data?”
“Well, here’s something fascinating for you. You remember the diary of Captain Edmondson, the archaeologist-turned — intelligence officer whose notes led you to the Gulf of Suez? A year before that botched arms shipment, he was a newly commissioned second lieutenant in Cairo, working in the same cipher office as his friend T. E. Lawrence, both of them bored out of their minds. Things perked up one day when high command detailed him to act as a discreet escort for a very important visitor who wanted to come incognito to visit the synagogue. Well, the VIP rumbled that Edmondson was following him, and when he reached the synagogue he let him catch up and invited him inside. The VIP was none other than Lord Kitchener, newly appointed secretary of state for war, visiting Egypt only months before he went down with the cruiser Hampshire in the North Sea. It turns out that there were half a dozen other men waiting in the synagogue, all of them getting on a bit in years. Kitchener told Edmondson that they were all in some way associated with General Gordon of Khartoum and came together every few years in the synagogue to celebrate his memory. One of the other men present was an American, Colonel Chaillé-Long.”
Jack stopped on the stairs. “How extraordinary. Gordon’s former chief of staff, the explorer of Lake Victoria?”
“By now an elderly man, and a famous author.”
“Of lavishly embellished tales, as I recall. Something of a dandy.”
“And Edmondson mentioned someone else. I’ve been itching to tell you, Jack, but I wanted to wait until we were here. It was a Royal Engineers colonel well known to you: John Howard.”
Jack stopped in his tracks, staring at her. “My great-great-grandfather? Incredible.” He looked down, thinking hard. “He’d retired by then, but he traveled several times to the Holy Land. He was a friend of Kitchener’s and had known Gordon. They were all Royal Engineers together. It makes sense.” He stared back at the floor of the synagogue, suddenly seeing those men standing there in his mind’s eye. “Amazing.”
“They came here to the synagogue because they believed in the Moses story. But, being engineers and practical men, they decided to find proof. Apparently, one night almost a quarter of a century earlier, in 1890, they had gathered together here for the first time, intent on excavating beneath the synagogue: Chaillé-Long, the then Colonel Kitchener, Captain Howard, and a Colonel Wilson, who had died since.”
“That would be Colonel Sir Charles Wilson,” Jack murmured. “Intelligence chief on the Gordon relief expedition, but before that a surveyor in Palestine who had discovered ancient structures beneath medieval Jerusalem. I prepped Rebecca on him before she went out there, as well as on Gordon and Kitchener. All of them were linked by their archaeological work in Palestine. In 1883 Gordon took a kind of sabbatical there, dispirited by his lack of progress in the Sudan and more interested in seeking proof of the Bible in the archaeology of Jerusalem.”