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various Karaite communities throughout Russia and the East. He was convinced that many of the Jews of Russia had once been Karaites. Moreover, he was eager to prove that the Karaites had been present in the Crimea for many millennia and so could not be responsible for the death of Christ. It has been claimed that, with this defensive though hardly watertight theory in mind, Firkovitch forged certain Karaite manuscripts as well as hundreds of ancient Crimean gravestones with Karaite inscriptions. However loony some of his ideas and dubious many of his methods, Firkovitch was clearly one of the first to have recognized the importance of genizot as a historical resource. From as early as the 1830s, when he first traveled to Jerusalem, he began to collect the manuscripts he found in these sacred crannies.
    In the process, Firkovitch became something of a geniza-hound, and when he returned to southern Russia, he made it a habit to travel from village to village—upon arrival, immediately heading for the synagogue and sniffing out its geniza. Whether it was held in a special attic chamber, buried in the graveyard, or stashed inside a wall, Firkovitch would find it. And his sense of sight was as good as his nose. He had, it was said,an especially keen eye for comparing the relative thickness of such synagogue walls and detecting a hidden stash.
    So it was that as an energetic seventy-six-year-old, Firkovitch visited the East yet again on another manuscript-finding mission. As he traveled, he foraged for papers in Jerusalem’s Karaite synagogue, splurged on others in Aleppo and Beirut, finagled a batch from the Samaritan community in Nablus, and bought several more from the aforementioned Cairo Geniza visitor and self-proclaimed snake charmer Yaakov Safir. Firkovitch eventually also made his way to Cairo, where he spent some six months sorting carefully through and packing up much of the contents of what he characterized in a letter as “a very large geniza.”
    For almost a century now, scholars have accused Firkovitch of having had “an interest in concealing the way in which he used to collect his material” and being “reticent about the origin of the treasures which he brought together in many years of daring travels.” While he may indeed have tried to maintain a certain air of mystery in public, now that his private archive has at last been opened, this portrait of Firkovitch as track-covering sham artist seems at best ungenerous: in a letter to a Karaite friend back in the Crimea he states explicitly that the room where he was working was “the geniza of the ancient synagogue that belongs to the Disciples of Scripture,” which is to say, the Karaites—and not the “Rabbanite” (i.e., normative, Talmud-studying) Jews of the Ben Ezra community.
    Yet Firkovitch makes it explicit in his letters that he also visited the Ben Ezra synagogue—and in fact intended, in his own words, “to take the [Ben Ezra] geniza out from under the dust … I’ve already opened it and seen that there’s hope of finding valuable things there.” (Upon hearing about the wonders that had been discovered in the Karaite geniza—which seems to have been more like a library than the Ben Ezra room, containing as it did many more complete volumes—the head of the Rabbanite community in Fustat was, Firkovitch reports, “burning with desire to open their genizot as well.” He was suffering, in other words,from a painful case of geniza envy—a syndrome that, we will see, grew increasingly common over the course of the next fifty years.) This time Firkovitch’s eyes were bigger than his stomach, or his wallet, and it seems he ran out of time—he was much too busy sorting through the substantial Karaite stash—and lacked the money to carry out this grand plan. Or maybe, like Safir, all that frantic medieval paper-pushing had simply exhausted him. In a weary-sounding letter to his son-in-law he admitted that he was ready to come home and