In
January of 1989, I met Benjamin Moses Kagan, a
retired Professor of Semitic Languages and Literature
at the University of Pennsylvania and Assistant
Curator of the Near East Section of the University
Museum. He was married to a distant cousin and we met
at a family affair in New York. We hit it off; he was
a splendid storyteller and on a subject close to my
heart, ancient history. We also shared a common
enthusiasm for wine. He claimed he was getting old
and it was time to deplete some of his wine cellar.
To this end he invited me and my wife, Ms Keogh, to
come visit him and his wife in Philadelphia. Since we
lived on the outskirts of Philly, we decided on just
such a visit.
His family emigrated from Russia when he was still a
child, first to England, for one or two years, and
then to the United States. They settled in
Philadelphia. He was already a renowned scholar
before the Second World War broke out, having
published books on how Greek knowledge was preserved
and advanced by the Arabs, and during the war he
served as an Intelligence Officer in North Africa.
After the war he returned to research and teaching at
the University of Pennsylvania, where he had taken
his degree.
He looked very healthy to me, short and quite trim,
overdressed in a tweed suit in summer. Why does
anyone wear a jacket at home? Despite his healthy
appearance, the man was in his eighties, I was given
to understand he had recently suffered a stroke. My
only clue was his slightly slurred speech, but that
could have also been the wine. He was drinking when I
arrived, he drank through a delicious dinner prepared
by his wife, and together we finished the bottle of
port that I had brought. Sadly, my new found friend
died the following year.
Perhaps it is better that he died before the war in
Bosnia. It would have been unbearable for him to
witness the bombardment of Mostar in 1992, when
Serbian forces targeted the libraries of that city,
including the Archives of Herzegovina, the Roman
Catholic Office of the Archbishop's library, the
Museum of Herzegovina, and the University of Mostar
Library. They did it again in Sarajevo, destroying
the National University Library of Bosnia. Over a
million volumes set on fire by incendiary grenades
launched by the Serbian nationalists. When does a
library become a military target? As a human chain of
volunteers endeavored to save some of the rarest
books and manuscripts, snipers tried picking them
off. It would have hurt Ben too gravely to know of
the loss of Sarajevo's Oriental Institute, thousands
of unique Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew manuscripts.
That evening in Philadelphia, while my wife and his
roamed the house discussing the Kagans' collection of
art, Ben and I were getting drunk in his library - Ms
Keogh was my designated driver. Books covered three
walls from carpet to ceiling, except where a door
allowed egress. His desk was on the far side of the
room, where there were no books, but a large bow
window overlooking their backyard and garden. His
rather large desk was in front of it. We began this
part of the evening sitting in two wingback chairs,
but ended up both sitting at his desk admiring books
from his collection.
Ben was old enough to remember the "boorish
Germans" taking revenge on the Belgium town of
Louvain during the Great War. Because German soldiers
had been killed, the Germans executed two hundred
civilians and burned down the historic center of the
town, which included the great library of the
Catholic University of Louvain. Over two hundred
thousand books and manuscripts destroyed, many
irreplaceable. As if that wasn't enough, after the
war the library was rebuilt and restocked, many of
the replacement volumes coming from the defeated
Germans, yet in the Second World War the German
artillery destroyed the library again. Telling me
about it brought him to tears. Ben loved libraries.
It was at this point that Ben shared his great secret
with me, a story I have not dared to share before now
because of promises I made to the old man, but I
think it is safe to retell what little I remember,
and it concerns libraries.
Soon after the war, Ben received a letter from
Professor Doktor Wilhelm Semmler of
Ruprecht-Karls-Universität where he taught
Klassische Philologie. There was an exchange of
letters concerning a particular manuscript that came
into Semmler's hands. During the Second World War,
Semmler, a hesitant Nazi, was sent by Hitler with
other experts to Monte Cassino to "rescue"
books before the expected bombardment by the Allies.
Fortunately the Vatican had anticipated the risk of
war and had removed about fifteen-hundred
irreplaceable manuscripts at the war's beginning.
There were plenty of books left that the German
scholars pored over and from which they selected what
they thought best. One book in particular took
Semmler's interest that no one else seemed to regard
important, neither the monks of the Benedictine
monastery nor his colleagues, perhaps because the
manuscript was in Arabic. Ben visited Wilhelm in
Heidelberg to see the book and while he was there to
translate it. What followed were several years of
correspondence as they debated the significance of
the book and its verity. It appeared to concern the
famous Library of Alexandria.
I explained to Ben that all I knew about the Library
of Alexandria came from Carl Sagan's television
series, Cosmos. It was from Sagan that I learned the
story of the last librarian of the Library of
Alexandria, a great scientist and a great beauty was
Hypatia. She was philosopher, physicist,
mathematician, and astronomer. But Cyrus, the
Archbishop of Alexandria detested her, a woman too
powerful and a symbol of the pagan world. He incited
a mob of Christians to riot. These Christians caught
her on her way to the library. She was stripped and
tortured, murdered and burned. And then they burned
down the library. Only Ben told me I had it wrong.
They did indeed murder Hypatia, but they had only
destroyed the Temple of Serapis, an annex to the
museum proper. True, the temple contained tens of
thousands of books and many a saint boasted about the
destruction of the library and the killing of the
"whore" of Alexandria, but it was the
Alexandrian Museum that held hundreds of thousands of
books and it was left untouched.
It was the destruction of the Library that Ben and
Semmler discussed. Long before the Christian attempt,
there was an earlier destruction. During the civil
war between Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great,
Caesar burned the Egyptian fleet to keep it from
falling into Pompey's hands. The fire spread to the
docks where 40,000 books that had been removed from
the Library were being stored before being shipped to
Rome. The warehouse caught on fire and the books
burned. It was an accident. Ben convinced Semmler
that the books were probably just copies. But what
concerned Ben and Wilhelm was the last and final
destruction of the Library of Alexandria.
In 640 A.D. the Muslims had control of Alexandria.
The wise men of the city were concerned as to the
welfare of the Library and approached the conquering
general, Amr, and inquired of him what was to be done
to preserve the books. Amr asked the advice of the
Caliph Omar in Medina, leader of the Muslim world.
The Caliph instructed that books agreeing with the
Koran were unnecessary, those disagreeing with the
Koran were wicked. He ordered them destroyed. The
legend has it that the scrolls were used to heat
Alexandria's thousands of bathhouses and the large
supply lasted six months. [Similarly, the Taliban
regime plundered the National Library of Afghanistan;
80,000 books were used for fuel and food wrappers.]
Then there was the Arabic codex in Wilhelm Semmler's
possession. It gave an ancient ship's manifest of
nearly a thousand books taken from Alexandria by
Muslim scholars who could not bear their destruction.
The books were sent to what Ben believed to be a
secret location in the desert of what is now Libya,
for the volume also contained a description of the
trip and the place where these surviving books were
hidden. When Semmler died, he willed the manuscript
to Ben. Ben studied the gift and made plans that
waited until his retirement. And there in the library
of his Philadelphia home Ben claimed to me that he
found the place where the rescued books are being
stored.
I didn't believe him because I had certainly never
heard the news of such a great discovery and because,
well, he was drunk. But there was a reason, he said,
for it not being well known, his discovery was a
secret he never revealed. I thought this incredible
and begged to know why. He told me the stories of his
difficult adventure across the Libyan Desert in
search of the secret location. The day after he found
it, the 15th April 1986, was the day President Ronald
Reagan ordered the American air strikes on Libya. It
was hard enough getting into the country, but now it
was too dangerous to stay. They returned to Egypt by
a different route than they came.
He left everything in place, knowing that the desert
would best preserve the papyrus scrolls that made up
the books formerly of the Library of Alexandria.
Nevertheless, he did bring away from the site one
scroll as proof of his find, Amfiaraos, a lost play
by Aristophanes. And where was it, I asked. Where was
it indeed!, he replied. He had landed at JFK Airport,
took a cab to Penn Station, and had an hour's wait
until his train. He went for a walk. He was mugged,
his briefcase taken from him. When the police
recovered the remains, they imagined the muggers, in
there disappointment of finding nothing of obvious
value in the briefcase, dumped it in a sidewalk
trashcan and set it ablaze.
The experience had a profound effect on Ben. He
decided the world was not yet ready to discover these
missing books. The Arabic codex in the briefcase was
only a copy. He has hidden the original and other
copies, confident they will be found one day, but not
in the near future, and the scrolls in the Libyan
Desert will wait.
Unfortunately, dear reader, Benjamin Moses Kagan and
Wilhelm Semmler do not exist. The Arabic codex is my
own fiction. If there is a hidden store of books in
the Libyan Desert, no one has told me. What is worst,
all the wonderful libraries destroyed in my story,
that part is true. |