Cairo Geniza

A Room You Put Things In and Do Not Take Out

A genizah is a storeroom for writing that may not be destroyed. Cambridge University Library, which holds most of this one, sets out the reasoning: "According to rabbinic law (see, for instance, Mishna Shabbat 16:1), once a holy book can no longer be used (because it is too old, or because its text is no longer relevant) it cannot be destroyed or casually discarded: texts containing the name of God should be buried or, if burial is not possible, placed in a genizah." The congregation of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, Old Cairo, had such a room, and "at least from the early 11th century" they filled it. What makes this one extraordinary is that they were not fussy about what counted. Cambridge's own list: "not only the expected religious works, such as Bibles, prayer books and compendia of Jewish law, but also what we would regard as secular works and everyday documents: shopping lists, marriage contracts, divorce deeds, pages from Arabic fables, works of Sufi and Shi'ite philosophy, medical books, magical amulets, business letters and accounts, and hundreds of letters."

It came to Cambridge through a chain that does not begin where the name suggests. The twin sisters A. S. Lewis and M. D. Gibson bought manuscripts in Egypt on their way to and from Saint Catherine's monastery in Sinai, and — in the library's own account — "On their return home to Cambridge, their friend Solomon Schechter was able to identify one of their purchases as the lost Hebrew original of the book of Ben Sira (known in the Christian tradition as Ecclesiasticus), a momentous discovery. He travelled to Cairo to find the source of the manuscripts, uncovering the remarkable hoard known as the Cairo Genizah." Schechter's own note to Lewis announcing the identification, dated 13 May 1896, is still in the library under the same shelfmark as the leaf itself. He went out with money from Charles Taylor, Master of St John's College, and "received permission from the Jewish community of Egypt to take away what he liked (explaining later, 'I liked all')" — a line the library still prints with affection, and one the third section of this article comes back to. The collection named after the two of them holds 193,000 fragments — a figure Cambridge gives on one page while another of its own pages says 200,000, which is a fair indication of how soft any count of this material is.

What Came Out of the Room

Three finds changed the study of Scripture. The first was Ben Sira: the Hebrew of a book that had survived for two thousand years only in Greek, turning up on paper in a Cairo storeroom. The second was a rule book of a Jewish sect nobody could identify, which Schechter published in 1910 as a Zadokite work — and which turned out, when the Dead Sea Scrolls appeared forty years later, to be the Damascus Document, a composition the Qumran caves also held. The Genizah had produced a sectarian text from the Second Temple period and nobody had been able to place it. The third is a set of Greek palimpsests: leaves whose original writing was scraped off and reused for Hebrew liturgical poetry, and whose undertext preserves columns of Origen's Hexapla on Psalm 22 and stretches of Aquila of Sinope's Greek translation of Kings — the sixth-century remains of texts otherwise almost entirely lost.

The Hebrew Bible material matters for a subtler reason. Before the Tiberian pointing became standard there were other systems of marking vowels, and the Genizah is where they survive: Cambridge's own project on the subject describes the Palestinian system as "less complete, less uniform, and more 'popular' in character than the dominant Tiberian system," and notes that it "is found only in manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah." Babylonian pointing turns up too, on a Mishnah manuscript whose colophon dates it to the year 1152 of the Seleucid era — 840 or 841 — which makes it, on Cambridge's account, not only the earliest dated manuscript of the Mishnah but the earliest medieval Hebrew book dated by a scribal colophon at all. And then there is everything else — the letters, the accounts, the court records that let a historian reconstruct an entire medieval society from the inside. Cambridge has put more than 21,000 fragments online with high-resolution images, and adds hundreds a month.

Who Tells This Story

The story as normally told has one hero and a passive local community, and that version has been coming apart for some years. R. Jefferson's work — which could only be read here at one remove, through a scholar summarising it, and that limit belongs in the sentence rather than in a footnote — argues that both halves of the phrase "the Cairo Genizah" mislead: there were several genizot in Cairo, material had been leaving them for decades before 1896, and — in her words, as reported by a scholar reviewing her argument — the singular label "can preclude us from truly appreciating the breadth of Jewish material culture in Cairo in all its varied manifestations over time." She puts the point about our own habits sharply: "Learning about the history of the documents we use is as useful as it is interesting, because the web of commitments that built the archives continues to have an impact on our conception of the past." N. Posegay, who works at Cambridge, writes of the period that "foreign 'collectors' acquired most of these manuscripts for European libraries in the second half of the nineteenth century" — the quotation marks are his.

The larger question follows from that, and Y. Meital states it plainly: "the race for the extraction of historical material, whether it is the remains of pharaonic temples and artifacts or worn-out fragments from genizot, and their transfer to public or private domains in Europe and North America, need to be studied in the context of colonialism... The removal of hundreds of thousands of genizah fragments from Cairo was accomplished in the high days of the British rule in Egypt." It is worth saying what that argument is and is not. Schechter had the Cairo community's permission for what he took, and Cambridge writes it into its own account. Other removals in the same decades did not go through that door, which is part of R. Jefferson's point. Nor is the case for having preserved it a weak one — the collection has been conserved, catalogued and, for more than twenty-one thousand fragments so far, photographed and published free to anyone, which is not what would have happened to it in the room. But permission granted by a community under an imperial administration is not the same transaction as permission granted between equals, and the two are worth keeping apart. The library's own telling has already moved: its current account of the Lewis-Gibson collection puts the sisters first and Schechter second, which is the order in which things actually happened.

Scripture references

• Psalms 22:1-2 — The psalm whose columns of Origen's Hexapla survive under a Genizah palimpsest
• 2 Kings 23:21-25 — Part of the passage preserved in Aquila of Sinope's Greek in another Genizah palimpsest
• Deuteronomy 6:4-9 — The Shema — the sort of text the law of genizah exists to protect from being thrown away

Sources

• Holding institutionCambridge Digital Library: the Cairo Genizah — Cambridge University Library · Read in full. The library's own account, and the source of the definition of a genizah quoted in section one (with its citation of Mishnah Shabbat 16:1), of "At least from the early 11th century", of the list of what the community deposited, and of the sentence about Schechter's permission and "I liked all", together with the figure of 193,000. Note that the library's Genizah Research Unit page gives 193,000 while its Lewis-Gibson page gives 200,000Supports: What a genizah is, when this one was filled, what was in it, and how it reached Cambridge
• Holding institutionCambridge University Library: the Lewis-Gibson Genizah Collection — Cambridge University Library · Read in full. This is the page that gets the sequence right, and the sentence quoted in section one is taken from it word for word — including the name "Solomon Schechter", which is left exactly as the library wrote it. It also records that the sisters gave the Ecclesiasticus leaf to the University Library and the rest of their manuscripts to Westminster College, and that Cambridge and the Bodleian bought their collection jointly in 2013Supports: The order of events in 1896, and Cambridge's own current telling of it
• Holding institutionCambridge University Library, Or.1102: Ben Sira 39:15-40:8, with Schechter's letter to Mrs Lewis — Cambridge University Library, Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit · The catalogue record notes that "Under the same classmark is the original letter written by Solomon Schechter to Mrs Lewis announcing the discovery of the first known fragment of 'the original Hebrew of Ecclesiasticus', dated 13/5/96". The Digital Library rate-limits repeated requests, so this record should be re-checked rather than assumed if the link ever failsSupports: The Ben Sira identification and its date
• Holding institutionJ. Olszowy-Schlanger, "The oldest Hebrew manuscript dated by its colophon: a leaf of a Mishna manuscript with Babylonian vocalization in Toronto" — Judith Olszowy-Schlanger; Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit, Cambridge University Library, Fragment of the Month, June 2023 · Read. Source for the date of the Babylonian-vocalised Mishnah manuscript in section two: the colophon gives "the year 1152 of the Seleucid era", which "corresponds to 840 or 841 of the Julian calendar", and the author's claim that "This date of 840-841 CE not only makes of 'MS A' the earliest dated manuscript of the Mishna, but also the very earliest medieval Hebrew book explicitly dated by scribal colophon." Note the range: a Seleucid year straddles two Julian ones, so the flat "AD 841" often printed for this manuscript is half of an answer. Also deposited in Cambridge's repository at repository.cam.ac.uk/items/67e26356-604a-4fdf-85ae-a17f26e34769Supports: The date of the Babylonian-pointed Mishnah manuscript named in section two
• Holding institutionCambridge University Library, "The Bible of the Land of Israel: Re-Examining the Palestinian Vocalisation Tradition" — Cambridge University Library; project led by Kim Phillips · Read in full. The source of the description of Palestinian vocalisation quoted in section two, including that it "is found only in manuscripts from the Cairo Genizah"Supports: The non-Tiberian vocalisation systems the Genizah preserves
• ScholarshipY. Meital, "'What Else There Is Still Beneath': The Multiple Dimensions of the Cairo Genizot", on R. Jefferson's "Deconstructing 'the Cairo Genizah'" — Yoram Meital, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev; Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, 11 December 2018 · Read in full. Meital's own words on colonialism are quoted from here. R. Jefferson's article — "Deconstructing 'the Cairo Genizah': A Fresh Look at Genizah Manuscript Discoveries in Cairo before 1897", Jewish Quarterly Review 108 (2018), 422-448 — is PAYWALLED and was NOT opened; the two sentences of hers quoted in section three are quoted from Meital's piece, at one remove, and are marked as such in the articleSupports: The argument that the Schechter-centred account and the singular label both mislead
• ScholarshipN. Posegay, "Searching for the Last Genizah Fragment in Late Ottoman Cairo" — Nick Posegay, Cambridge University Library · International Journal of Middle East Studies 54:3 (2022), 423-441. The body is paywalled and was NOT opened; the phrase quoted in section three, scare quotes included, is from the abstract on the publisher's own page · paywalledSupports: The framing of the nineteenth-century collectors
• EncyclopediaWikipedia: Cairo Geniza — Read. The only source consulted here for the worldwide total of about 400,000 fragments, which it takes from M. Rustow, The Lost Archive (2020), 451, together with her own caveat: "There is no universally agreed-on methodology for counting Cairo Geniza fragments.... Nonetheless, four hundred thousand is the best count we currently have." Rustow's book was NOT opened; the figure is reported at two removes and the facts block says so. It is also the source for the other holding libraries named there. No source consulted here gives a count of how many institutions hold Genizah material, so the facts block gives noneSupports: The worldwide total of Genizah fragments, at two removes, and the other libraries holding them

Further reading

• Cambridge University Library: the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit
• Cambridge Digital Library: the Cairo Genizah collection
• Wikipedia: Cairo Geniza

Reflect

A thousand years of one community's paper survived because nobody was willing to throw away a page with God's name on it. What do you treat that carefully?