What is the Cairo Geniza?

A Treasure Trove

The Cairo Geniza is the term used for a cache of around 300,000 manuscript pages, some complete and others fragmentary, that were found on the premises of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo and in a number of other locations in Cairo.

The Geniza

Jewish law prohibits destroying any writings that contain the name of God, indeed any sacred writings. Traditionally, these texts, when no longer usable, are stored temporarily and then buried in the earth. At some point a small room in the Ben Ezra synagogue in Cairo was designated to hold such texts. Over the course of time, primarily during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, documents of all sorts were discarded in this room but never buried permanently, and, because the air in Cairo is so dry, they were preserved in relatively good condition.

In medieval Cairo, it seems to have been common practice to throw into the geniza any writing in Hebrew characters, whether or not the texts were of a religious nature. As a result, the geniza preserved thousands of documents, containing not only religious and literary texts but also personal letters, wills, estate records, inventories, records of court cases, medical prescriptions, tax receipts, betrothal agreements, marriage contracts, bills of divorce, dowry lists, and more. The Cairo Geniza collection is therefore one of the most important sources for the history of the Jewish community in premodern Egypt and indeed for the history of the entire medieval Mediterranean world.

The Discovery and Preservation of the Geniza

Over the second half of the nineteenth century, a number of Jewish scholars and collectors made their way to Egypt and the Middle East in search of old manuscripts. Several of them returned with materials from the Ben Ezra synagogue. At the time, Europeans—Jewish and non-Jewish—were traveling through the Middle East, curious about ancient texts. A lucrative market for old manuscripts encouraged both scrupulous and unscrupulous dealers, and it seems likely that some of the materials now found in the Cairo Geniza collection may have come from other storage places.

As a result of the piecemeal and decades-long process of retrieving the Cairo Geniza documents, the fragments are currently held by a range of libraries around the world. The largest collections are currently housed in the libraries of Cambridge University, the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. The vast majority of these fragments have now been digitized and are freely available to scholars.