Cairo Genizah-870 CE to 19th century
400,000 manuscripts
“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.”—Mishna Shabbat 16:1
For a thousand years, the Jewish community of Fustat (Old Cairo), placed their worn-out books and other writings in a storeroom (genizah) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue— The Cairo Geniza (Genizah) is a collection of some 400,000 Jewish manuscript fragments and Fatimid administrative documents in Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic.
These manuscripts outline a 1,000-year continuum (870 CE to 19th century) of Jewish Middle-Eastern and North African history and comprise the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts in the world.
The Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection at Cambridge University Library is the world's largest and most important single collection of medieval Jewish manuscripts. , and in 1896–97 the Cambridge scholar, Dr Solomon Schechter, with financial help from the Master of St John’s College, Charles Taylor, arrived to examine it. He received permission from the Jewish community of Egypt to take away what he liked (explaining later, ‘I liked it all’), and he brought 193,000 manuscripts back to Cambridge, where they form the Taylor-Schechter Cairo Genizah Collection.
Other libraries hold major parts of the collection including the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the University of Manchester, and the Antonin Cairo Genizah Collection in Saint Petersburg.
Thousands of books and articles have been written about the Cairo Genizah.1
Kahle, Paul. The Cairo Geniza. 2d ed. New York: Praeger, 1960.
Hoffman, Adina, Peter Cole, and S. Schechter. Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza. New York: Nextbook, 2011.
Ghosh, Amitav. In an Antique Land. London: Granta. 2012.
Reif, Stefan. A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo: The History of Cambridge University's Genizah Collection. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013.
Rustow, Marina (2020). The Lost Archive Traces of a Caliphate in a Cairo Synagogue. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
I just finished reading (as in, five minutes ago) Louise Penny's Bury Your Dead, and the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec City plays a major role. As does the problem of preservation of books and papers. Fascinating.