Cairo Geniza
30°00′21″N 31°13′52″E / 30.0058°N 31.2310°E
The Cairo Geniza, alternatively spelled Genizah, is a collection of some 400,000
The Genizah texts are written in various languages, especially
Manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza are now dispersed among a number of libraries, including the
Discovery and present locations
The first European to note the collection was apparently Simon van Gelderen (a great-uncle of
The Genizah fragments have now been archived in various libraries around the world. The
Westminster College in Cambridge held 1,700 fragments, which were deposited by Lewis and Gibson in 1896.[22] In 2013 the two Oxbridge libraries, the Bodleian Library at Oxford and Cambridge University Library, joined together to raise funds to buy the Westminster collection (now renamed the Lewis-Gibson collection) after it was put up for sale for £1.2 million. This is the first time the two libraries have collaborated for such a fundraising effort.[21][22]
Contents and significance
Many of the fragments found in the Cairo Genizah may be dated to the early centuries of the second millennium CE, and there are a fair number of earlier items as well as a number of nineteenth-century pieces. The manuscripts in the Genizah include sacred and religious materials as well as great deal of secular writings. The Genizah materials include a wide range of content. Among the literary fragments, the most popular categories are liturgical texts, Biblical and related texts, and Rabbinic literature. There are also materials with philosophical, scientific, mystical, and linguistic writings. Among the non-literary items there are legal documents and private letters. Also found were school exercises and merchants' account books, as well as communal records of various sorts.[23]
The normal practice for genizot (pl. of genizah) was to remove the contents periodically and bury them in a cemetery. Many of these documents were written in the
The importance of these materials for reconstructing the social and economic history for the period between 950 and 1250 cannot be overemphasized. Judaic scholar
In particular the various records of payments to labourers for building maintenance and the like form by far the largest collection of records of day wages in the Islamic world for the early medieval period, despite difficulties in interpreting the currency units cited and other aspects of the data.[6] They have invariably been cited in discussions of the medieval Islamic economy since the 1930s, when this aspect of the collection was researched, mostly by French scholars.[27]
Many of the items in Cairo Genizah are not a complete manuscript, but are instead a fragment of one or two leaves, many of which are damaged themselves. Similarly, the pages of a single manuscript often became separated. It is not uncommon to find the pages of one manuscript housed in three or four different modern libraries. On the other hand, non-literary writings often lost their value with the passage of time, and were left in the Genizah while still more or less intact.[23]
The materials comprise a vast number of texts, including many parts of Jewish religious writings and even fragments from the
The non-literary materials, which include court documents, legal writings, and the correspondence of the local Jewish community (such as the Letter of the Karaite elders of Ascalon), are somewhat smaller, but still impressive: Goitein estimated their size at "about 10,000 items of some length, of which 7,000 are self-contained units large enough to be regarded as documents of historical value. Only half of these are preserved more or less completely."[33]
The number of documents added to the Genizah changed throughout the years. For example, the number of documents added were fewer between 1266 and circa 1500, when most of the Jewish community had moved north to the city of Cairo proper, and saw a rise around 1500 when the local community was increased by
A number of other genizot have provided smaller discoveries across the Old World, notably Italian ones such as that of Perugia.[34] An 11th-century Afghan Geniza was found in 2011.[35]
The Cairo Genizah fragments were extensively studied, cataloged and translated by Paul E. Kahle. His book, The Cairo Geniza was published by Blackwell in 1958, with a second edition in 1959.[36]
Accounting
Jewish bankers in Old Cairo used a
Research
The Cairo Genizah Collections at the University of Pennsylvania and at the Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary is the subject of a citizen-science project on the website Zooniverse. Project volunteers are enlisted to sort digitized fragments of the Cairo Genizah, in order to facilitate research on the fragments.[38]
The Friedberg Geniza Project is of great importance to research inasmuch as it includes all Genizah fragments and bibliographical data relating to them.
Since 1986, the
Cultural impact
Indian anthropologist and writer Amitav Ghosh recounts his study of the Genizah fragments related to Jewish merchant Abraham Ben Yiju in the book In an Antique Land.[41]
See also
- Afghan Geniza, similar cache of ancient religious and secular documents
- Damascus Document
- Dead Sea Scrolls
- Dunhuang manuscripts, similar cache of ancient religious and secular documents
- Elephantine papyri, similar cache of ancient religious and secular documents
- Herculaneum papyri, similar cache of ancient religious and secular documents
- Timbuktu manuscripts
- Solomon ben Semah
- Yusuf ibn 'Awkal, prominent merchant whose correspondence was found in the Cairo Geniza
- History of the Jews in Egypt
- Synagogues in Cairo
References
- ^ Rustow 2020, p. 451. "There is no universally agreed-on methodology for counting Cairo Geniza fragments....Nonetheless, four hundred thousand is the best count we currently have."
- ^ a b c Dospel, Marek (June 1, 2022). "Text Treasures: Cairo Geniza". Biblical Archaeology Society. Archived from the original on June 1, 2022. Retrieved October 23, 2022.
- ^ Burkitt, Francis Crawford (1897). Fragments of the Books of Kings, According to the Translation of Aquila from a MS formerly in the Geniza at Cairo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 10.
From the style of the writing the MS must be dated in the end of the 5th or the beginning of the 6th century AD.
- .
The following is a survey of fifty-seven manuscripts and printed texts dated after 1864, comprising more than one hundred discrete classmarks (i.e., individual fragments or small groups of fragments with a single cataloguing number) from Genizah collections.
- ISBN 0-5202-2158-3.
- ^ a b c d "Cairo Genizah". Jewish Virtual Library. Archived from the original on November 11, 2017. Retrieved October 23, 2022.
- ^ a b c "The Cairo Genizah, the Largest and Most Diverse Collection of Medieval Manuscripts in the World". History of Information. Archived from the original on July 5, 2021. Retrieved October 23, 2022.
- ^ Jefferson, Rebecca J. W. (2022). The Cairo Genizah and the Age of Discovery in Egypt. London: I.B. tauris. pp. 191–207.
- ^ Schechter, Solomon (1908). Studies in Judaism: Second Series. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. pp. 1–12.
- ^ Hoffman, Adina; Cole, Peter (2011). Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza. New York: Nextbook, Schocken. p. 39.
- .
- ISBN 0-5202-2158-3.
- ISBN 0-679-72783-3.
- ^ Ghosh (1992), p. 83.
- ISBN 978-0-8052-4258-4.
- ISBN 978-1-4000-3474-1.
- ^ Ghosh (1992), pp. 88ff.
- ^ Soskice (2009) pp. 230, 232
- ^ "The Cairo Genizah Collection". Cambridge Digital Library. Retrieved 23 September 2013.
- ^ "Library Special Collections". www.jtsa.edu. 2 February 2016. Retrieved 2021-07-28.
- ^ a b "Historic rivals join forces to save 1,000 years of Jewish history". Bodleian Libraries. 8 February 2013. Archived from the original on 23 April 2013. Retrieved 23 February 2013.
- ^ a b "Appeal to buy Lewis-Gibson Genizah Collection". BBC News Online. Retrieved February 18, 2013.
- ^ .
- ISBN 9781490824086. Retrieved 7 January 2021.
- ^ Shohat, Ella. “THE QUESTION OF JUDEO-ARABIC.” The Arab Studies Journal, vol. 23, no. 1, 2015, pp. 14–76. JSTOR website Retrieved 4 Aug. 2023.
- ^ Goitein. A Mediterranean Society, vol. 1, p. 23.
- )
- .
- ^ Cowley, A. E.; Neubauer, Adolf (1897). The Original Hebrew of a Portion of Ecclesiasticus. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- JSTOR 1450712.
- .
- ^ Schechter, Solomon (1910). Fragments of a Zadokite Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- ^ Goitein. A Mediterranean Society, vol. 1, p. 13
- ^ "The Fragments of Hebrew Manuscripts discovered in the binding of books in the Biblioteca del Dottorato of the University of Perugia". University of Perugia. Retrieved 23 February 2013.
- ^ "Ancient manuscripts indicate Jewish communities once thrived in Afghanistan". CBS. 3 January 2013. Retrieved 4 December 2013.
- ISBN 9780835779616. Retrieved 2014-01-10.
- ^ "Medieval Traders as International Change Agents: A Comment". Michael Scorgie, The Accounting Historians Journal, Vol. 21, No. 1 (June 1994), pp. 137–143
- ^ "Zooniverse". Scribes of the Cairo Geniza. Retrieved 15 September 2017.
- ^ "Text Searchable Database". Princeton Geniza Lab. Princeton University. Retrieved 6 October 2023.
- ^ "Handwritten Text Recognition". Princeton Geniza Lab. Princeton university. Retrieved 6 October 2023.
- OCLC 63679806.
Sources
- Rustow, Marina (2020). The Lost Archive Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue. Princeton: Princeton University Press. OCLC 1132420189.
- Burkitt, Francis Crawford (1897). Fragments of the Books of Kings, According to the Translation of Aquila from a MS formerly in the Geniza at Cairo. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Posegay, Nick (2022). "Searching for the Last Genizah Fragment in Late Ottoman Cairo: A Material Survey of Egyptian Jewish Literary Culture". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 54 (FirstView): 423–441. .
- Goitein, Shelomo Dov (1967–1993). A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-5202-2158-3.
- Hoffman, Adina; Cole, Peter (2011). Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza. New York: Nextbook, Schocken. ISBN 978-0805242584.
- Soskice, Janet (2009). The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 978-1-4000-3474-1.
Further reading
- Reif, Stefan C. (2000). A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo: The History of Cambridge University's Genizah Collection. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon. ISBN 978-0700713127.
- Glickman, Mark (2011). Sacred Treasure - The Cairo Genizah: The Amazing Discoveries of Forgotten Jewish History in an Egyptian Synagogue Attic. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing. ISBN 978-1580234313.
- Anthony Julius, "The Secret Life of Cairo’s Jews", Book Review, May 27, 2011.
- Leo Deuel, The Testaments of Time, Knopf, 1965. Chapter XVIII
External links
- The Friedberg Jewish Manuscript Society
- Princeton Geniza Project Website
- Cairo Genizah at Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries
- Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit at the University of Cambridge
- Genizah Fragments Blog of the Cambridge University Library
- Taylor-Schechter Collection on Cambridge Digital Library
- Penn/Cambridge Genizah Fragment Project
- Scribes of the Cairo Geniza Project of transcribing the documents using Zooniverse platform
- A Window into Jewish Medieval Life
- Arabic Poetry in the Cairo Genizah
- Cairo Geniza: General Survey and History of Discovery, Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, by Stefan Reif, 2010, pp 7 – 12
- Women of the Cairo Geniza Podcast episode highlighting women's presence in Geniza texts, Tzipora Weinberg in conversation with Eve Krakowski