(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 77, #2, Autumn 2022)
Once upon a time, there was a studious young Jewish immigrant who had to leave school at the age of 14 to go to work to support his family since the money-making ideas of his feckless father usually ended in disaster. He got a job in a bank (no minimum ages then) and in his spare time collected and sold empty bottles and paraffin tins, flogged chocolates and peanuts in theatres and worked as a railway shunter, giving his wages to his mother, retaining his savings and studying whenever he could. By the time Morris Alexander was 16, he had saved enough to return to SACS, winning a scholarship in 1897 to study law at Cambridge.[1] There he was taken under the wing of their Lecturer in Talmudics and Reader in Rabbinics, Rabbi Solomon Schechter, who had recently returned from an extraordinary visit to Cairo.
One day Rabbi Schechter had been accosted in a Cambridge quadrangle by identical twin sisters, Scottish Semitic scholars, who had bought some pieces of old parchment in Cairo. One contained Hebrew writing and looked, one of the sisters said, “as if a grocer had used it for something greasy”.[2] They were keen to know what was written on it. It was serendipitous that they showed it to Rabbi Schechter. He was the one person who would have been able to identify it immediately as an 11th or 12th Century copy of the Hebrew proverbs of Ben Sira, an apocryphal book known as Ecclesiasticus to Christians and the Wisdom of Ben Sira to Jews and previously known only from the Greek translation. Schechter had been collating all the Talmudic references to it hoping to reassemble the original Hebrew text. Here, miraculously, he was shown a portion in the original Hebrew. Excitedly he rushed to Charles Taylor, the Master of St John’s College, who provided him with the funds to go to Cairo in search of further finds. After trawling the Cairo bookshops, Schechter was directed to the Ben Ezra synagogue where, with a letter from the British Chief Rabbi introducing him to the Chief Rabbi of Cairo, he was given permission to take what he wanted.
Because G-d’s name is holy, Jews do not destroy documents that might contains it but keep them safe in a “genizah” (a room attached to a synagogue housing damaged, discarded texts and sacred relics). When a genizah is lacking, a ceremony is held at a cemetery to bury the pages. The Cairo documents had been stored in the genizah above the ladies’ gallery in the Ben Ezra Synagogue,[3] protected by a belief that a snake would kill anyone trying to gain access. Schechter, not superstitious, climbed a rickety ladder and through a hole in the wall descended into a dark room containing layer after dusty layer of documents that had accumulated over a period of nearly a thousand years. Scraps of parchment crumbled underfoot as he moved carefully about, raising clouds of dust that all but suffocated him as he rummaged around.
Schechter described the little room as “a battlefield of books and the literary production of many centuries… strewn over an area. Some of the belligerents have perished outright and are literally ground to dust in the terrible struggle for space while others, as if overtaken by the general crush, are squeezed into big unshakable lumps which can no longer be separated without serious damage to their constituents”.[4] Nevertheless he returned to Cambridge with thirty large bags containing 193 000 Hebrew manuscripts dating from the year 870 to the 19th century, but mostly from the 10th to 13th Centuries. They now form the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection.[5]
Anyone wanting to study mediaeval Jewry today needs to consult these documents because they contain a treasure house of information – there are schoolbooks, account books, legal cases, family letters, shopping lists, marriage contracts, divorce deeds, medical books, magical amulets and business letters as well as religious material. On Saturday afternoons, Rabbi Schechter held “open house” to the small Cambridge Jewish community. The Schechter’s home became a place of discussion and debate in which the whole family, including the children and guests took part and Morris Alexander soon became a welcome guest.[6] When he was due to return to Cape Town, Schechter’s precocious 12 year-old daughter Ruth told him not to get engaged to anyone but to wait for her because she wanted to marry him.
Back in Cape Town, Advocate Alexander immersed himself in Jewish communal activity. He became secretary of the Cape Town Jewish Philanthropic Society, showing a concern for the poor that manifested throughout his life. When the government, wanting to exclude Jewish and Indian immigrants, passed a law denying entry to anyone unable to read and write a European language, he organised a deputation to the Attorney-General. They succeeded in proving that Yiddish was a European language by getting a non-Jewish sworn German translator to translate an extract read to him from a Yiddish encyclopaedia describing the ideas of the Swiss geologist Ludwig Agassiz[7]. In 2004, Alexander founded the Jewish Board of Deputies to look after Jewish civil and religious rights.
Alexander was a keen Zionist. It appealed to his innate sense of justice and he was elected as president of the newly established Roeland Street synagogue (1902). This was a Zionist synagogue and every congregant had to buy a shekel, making him a member of the Zionist Organisation. At that time the large Anglicized Cape Town Hebrew Congregation, the mother synagogue established in 1841, was antagonistic to Zionism, regarding it as showing disloyalty to the British Crown. So were the smaller Orthodox East European synagogues as they believed that only the Messiah could restore the Jews to the Holy Land. Because of the religious antagonism, the Roeland Street synagogue did not have a rabbi, and Alexander gave the sermons dressed in his Cambridge academic gown with a mortar board on his head. In 1904 he was elected secretary of the Dorshei Zion Society and treasurer of the Cape Town Committee for the National Tribute for Dr Herzl’s children[8]. In 1905 he was elected to the City Council.
When Herzl’s successor David Wolffsohn, the president of the Zionist Organisation, visited Cape Town in 1906 Alexander became the chairman of the Wolffsohn Reception Committee. Wolffsohn had not intended to visit this remote Zionist outpost but was taking a trip for health reasons en route to Palestine. He had planned to remain incognito, but the news got out even before he had landed, and receptions were organised wherever the ship docked. He even had to go up to Johannesburg, where a Zionist Conference had been hastily arranged.[9]
All this time Morris had been writing monthly letters to Ruth Schechter as she had requested. She was now 18 and living in New York, to where they had moved in 1902 when her father was appointed as President of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Their wedding for 200 guests took place on 9 June 1907. Thereafter they set off for a honeymoon in Europe, where Morris wanted to attend the 1907 Zionist Conference at The Hague as the official South African delegate. When Wolffsohn learned of this, he insisted that the Alexanders stop off in Germany to visit them in Cologne.
“Shortly after our arrival at Cologne on our honeymoon,” Alexander wrote, “an official at Zionist Headquarters called for my wife and myself at the hotel and guided us to the residence of the Wolffsohns where we dined. The house was full of Jewish interest and I remember especially the beautiful staircase looking over which was a stained-glass window representing Heine’s Prinzess in Sabboth … A very interesting personality at the dinner was Herzl’s friend the Rev. Hechler, a charming non-Jew who had introduced him to many royal personages in Europe. He pulled out of his capacious pockets many maps packed with interesting international statistic which he expounded to us.”
Herzl had called Hechler “the most unusual person I have met in this movement so far.” William Hechler[10] was born in India, where his German father was an Anglican missionary, and was sent to boarding schools in London and Basel. He showed an interest in religious studies and languages, eventually learning to speak English, German, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French and two African dialects. Like his father, he became an Anglican clergyman, was wounded and twice decorated in the German army during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 and thereafter became tutor to the children of Frederick I, Grand Duke of Baden. It was then that he established a warm friendship with the Grand Duke’s nephew, later to be German Kaiser Wilhelm II.
In 1881, as “Metropolitan Secretary” of the Church Pastoral Aid Society, Hechler was sent to Germany, France and Russia to investigate the Jewish situations there and was shocked and revolted by the violent pogroms taking place. He met Leon Pinsker, who had been so upset by the 1881 pogroms that he had written the book Auto –Emancipation arguing that antisemitism would only stop once the Jews had a state of their own. This reverberated with Hechler’s own ideas. In 1884 he wrote his own book, The Restoration of the Jews to Palestine, calling for the Jews to return to Palestine and writing “It is the duty of every Christian to love the Jew.” In Constantinople the British Ambassador refused to deliver to the Sultan of Turkey a letter from Queen Victoria that Hechler gave him asking the Sultan to permit the Jews to return to Palestine.
From 1885 to 1910 Hechler was the Chaplain of the British Embassy in Vienna. He began collecting Bibles and maps of Palestine and constructed a scale model of the Temple, working out timelines for the Restoration of the Jews and the Second Coming of Jesus. He predicted that in 1897 or 1898 a major event would occur that would lead to the Restoration of the Jews. In early March 1896, he found on a Viennese book stall Herzl’s newly published book Der Judenstaat and he promptly arranged to visit Herzl on 10 March.
Herzl described his visitor in his diary: “A likeable, sensitive man with the long grey beard of a prophet. He waxed enthusiastic over my solution. He regards my movement as a ‘prophetic crisis’ – one he foretold two years ago for he had calculated in accordance with a prophecy dating from Omar’s reign (637-638) that after 42 prophetical months, that is, 1260 years, Palestine would be restored to the Jews. This would make it 1897-1898. When he read my book, he immediately hurried to the British Ambassador in Vienna and told him: ‘the fore-ordained movement is here’. He wants to place my tract in the hands of some German princes. He used to be a tutor in the household of the Grand Duke of Baden, he knows the German Kaiser and thinks he can get me an audience.”
Less than a week later, Herzl went to see Hechler.
“Yesterday I visited the Rev. Hechler. The room was lined with books on every side, floor to ceiling. Nothing but Bibles. Then he spread out before me his chart of comparative history, and finally a map of Palestine. It is a large military staff map in four sheets which, when laid out, covered the entire floor. “We have prepared the ground for you!” Hechler said triumphantly.
Herzl told Hechler that in order to be believed he needed to meet a minister of state or a prince and the most suitable would be the German Kaiser. Hechler immediately agreed to go to Berlin if Herzl would give him the travelling expenses.
“Of course, I promised them to him at once”, Herzl wrote. “He considers our departure for Jerusalem to be quite imminent and showed me the coat pocket in which he will carry his big map of Palestine when we shall be riding around the Holy Land together.[11]”
These would have been the same maps and possibly from the same coat pocket that he was to show Morris Alexander at the dinner at the Wolffsohns.
Hechler went off to Berlin. He was unable to see the Kaiser but spoke to the Grand Duke and showed him his “prophetic tables”, which seemed to make an impression. On 25 April, he brought a very nervous Herzl to a private audience with the Grand Duke, who became a lifelong advocate of Herzl and the Zionist cause and used his office and his relationship with his nephew the Kaiser to support them. Throughout 1897, Hechler worked to introduce Herzl to the Christian world, speaking at every opportunity and writing to every interested clergyman. Herzl was invited to a private audience with Kaiser Wilhelm on 15 October 1898, when the Kaiser stopped in Constantinople for a State visit. The Kaiser asked Herzl what he wished him to ask of the Sultan, to which Herzl replied, “A Chartered Company – under German protection”. The Kaiser brought the subject up twice with the Sultan, but the latter refused to consider granting the Jews a charter to Palestine, even in return for the Jews assuming the Turkish foreign debt. Once the Kaiser realised that the Sultan would not agree, he lost interest.
In August 1897 Herzl invited Hechler to the First World Zionist Congress in Basel, Switzerland, as a non-voting delegate and as the “first Christian Zionist.” Hechler would attend five Congresses as Herzl’s aide and friend including the one attended by Alexander.
Herzl died on 3 July 1904 aged 44. Hechler visited him the day before and wrote that “it was God’s will that I should help my dear friend, Dr Theodore Herzl, that was made manifest in my being in Vienna from the year 1885 to 1910 in a position which enabled me to bring the attention of certain people of importance to the Messianic figure of the Jewish leader. The memory of our work together for God’s ancient people is precious and sacred to me… I was with him at the beginning of his dreams, and I was with him almost at the last moment of his earthly life. On Saturday, 2nd July, I sat at his bedside… I comforted him in his sickness… and he said: “Remember me to them all and tell them that I have given my heart’s blood for my people.”[12]
Fast forward to the 1907 Congress. When the Alexanders arrived in The Hague, Morris met up again with David Wolffsohn and Rev Hechler. Hechler wanted to give Alexander a present and took him shopping. Alexander wrote “The Rev Hechler gave me a little “channuchah” lamp as a parting gift. I went with him to the Dutch shop at The Hague where he purchased it, and I still remember his indignation when the lady in the shop did not immediately understand what a “channuchah” lamp was.[13]”
The Alexanders returned to Cape Town bearing the chanukiyah with them. In 1909 Ruth’s father came to visit them and meet his grandchildren. Rabbi Schechter was given a tremendous welcome at a banquet in the synagogue.[14] The great-grandfather of this writer had an argument with Schechter because he was carrying some papers on the Sabbath, but Schechter visited him the next day and they corresponded for some years[15]
After 25 years of marriage, Ruth scandalised the community by divorcing Morris and marrying Benjamin Farrington, an Irish Catholic lecturer in Latin and Greek at the University of Cape Town. Both of them were committed Marxists. Alexander remarried in 1935 and died aged 68 in 1945, greatly esteemed for his long record of community service, including as the longest serving Member of Parliament. In 1968 his widow Enid presented the chanukiyah to the Cape Town Jewish Museum.[16]
As for the Rev William Hechler, he died in England on 3 February 1931, aged 86.[17] Before his death Herzl had asked the Zionist community to remember and honor Hechler for all he had done for him and Zionism. From the late 1920s, the Zionist Executive provided a small monthly pension of £10 to him. In 1934, the Jewish community of Vienna proposed erecting a statue in honor of Reverend Hechler but with the rise of Hitler it was never done. Led by the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation and the British Christian Zionist Movement, an appropriate graveside memorial was erected on 31 January 2011.
The Cape SA Jewish Board of Deputies, which Morris Alexander had founded in 1904, thought that it would be fitting to give to the museum the chanukiyah that Hechler had given to Alexander. On 8 July 2021 Tamar Lazarus, immediate past president of WIZO South Africa, presented it to Daniel Woiczek, General Manager of the Friends of Zion Museum. The museum will be designing a custom-made glass cabinet in which it will be displayed.
The Board thought it appropriate that the chanukiyah, given as a gift by a Christian Zionist to a Jewish Zionist forty years before the dream they had both cherished would become a reality, finds a permanent home in the home they both worked to create.
Gwynne Schrire, a veteran contributor to Jewish Affairs and a long-serving member of its editorial board, is a former Deputy Director of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies – Cape Council. She has authored, co-written and edited over twenty books on aspects of South African Jewish and Western Cape history.
NOTES
[1] Alexander, Enid, Morris Alexander; A Biography, Juta, Cape Town, 1953
[2] Solomon Schechter (1847-1915): a Jewish polymath with a …
https://www.cam.ac.uk ›
research › features › solomon-
[3]
The Cairo Genizah, the Largest and Most Diverse Collection …
https://www.historyofinformation.com ›detail
[4]
Hirson, Baruch, The Cape Town Intellectuals; Ruth Schechter and her Circle,
1907-1954, Witwatersrand University press, Johannesburg, 2001, 15
[5]
Ceadel. EB, A Guide to the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Collection,
Cambridge University Library, 1973, 4
[6]
Hirson, Baruch, op cit,21
[7]
Shain, Milton, Jewry and Cape Society, Historical Publication Society
Cape Town 1983, 131
[8]
Alexander, op cit,39-40
[9]
Gitlin, Marcia, The Vision Amazing, Menorah Book Club, Johannesburg,
1950 143-146
[10]
Reverend William Hechler: Father Of Christian
Zionismhttps://mida.org.il › כל הכתבו
[11]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hechler#cite_note-5
[12]
Herzl Memorial Volume published in 1928 by the American Zionist Organisation,
IN William
Hechler – Wikipedia
[13]
Alexander, Enid, op cit, 40
[14] Hoffman,
Nechemiah Dov, Sefer Ha –Zichronot, Book of Memoirs: Reminiscences of
South African Jewry Jewish Publications, South Africa, UCT, 1996, 34
[15]
Schrire Carmel and Gwynne, The Reb and the Rebel: Jewish narratives in
South Africa 1892-1913, UCT Press, Cape Town, 2016
[16]
Jewish Museum Accession number 1968/63.
[17]
Death of Reverend William Hechler Herzl’s Friend and …
https://www.jta.org › archive
› death-of-reverend-willi
