Cairo Geniza
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The Cairo Geniza is an accumulation of almost 200,000 Jewish manuscripts that were found in the genizah or store room of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, presently Old Cairo, Egypt, the Basatin cemetery east of Old Cairo, and a number of old documents that were bought in Cairo in the later 19th century.
The significance of the Cairo genizah was first recognized by the Jewish traveler and researcher Jacob Saphir in the mid 1800s, but it was chiefly through the work of Solomon Schechter at the end of the 19th century that the contents of the genizah were brought to scholarly and popular attention.
These documents have now been archived in various American and European libraries. The Taylor-Schechter collection in the University of Cambridge runs to 140,000 manuscripts; there are a further 40,000 manuscripts at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Also, the John Rylands University Library in Manchester holds a collection of over 11,000 fragments, which are currently being digitised and uploaded to an online archive.
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[edit] Contents and significance
These documents were written from about 870 AD to as late as 1880. The normal practice for genizas was to periodically remove the contents and bury them in a cemetery. Many of these documents were written in the Arabic language using the Hebrew alphabet. As Hebrew was considered the language of God by the Jews, and the Hebrew script to be the literal writing of God, the texts could not be destroyed even long after they had served their purpose. The Jews who wrote the materials in the geniza were familiar with the culture and language of their contemporary society. The documents are invaluable as evidence for how colloquial Arabic of this period was spoken and understood. Goitein demonstrates that the Jewish creators of the documents were part of their contemporary society: they practiced the same trades as their Muslim and Christian neighbors, including farming; they bought, sold, and rented properties to and from their contemporaries.
The importance of these materials for reconstructing the social and economic history for the period between 950 and 1250 cannot be overemphasized; the index the scholar Goitein created covers about 35,000 individuals, which included about 350 "prominent people" (which include Maimonides and his son Abraham), 200 "better known families", and mentions of 450 professions and 450 goods. He identified material from Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria (but not Damascus or Aleppo), Tunisia, Sicily, and even covering trade with India. Cities mentioned range from Samarkand in Central Asia to Seville and Sijilmasa, Morocco to the west; from Aden north to Constantinople; Europe not only is represented by the Mediterranean port cities of Narbonne, Marseilles, Genoa and Venice, but even Kiev and Rouen are occasionally mentioned.
The materials include a vast number of books, most of them fragments, which Goitein estimated number 250,000 leaves, including parts of Jewish religious writings and fragments from the Qur'an. Of particular interest to biblical scholars are several incomplete manuscripts of Sirach. Together they provide about two-thirds of Sirach—in Hebrew. According to Frederic Kenyon, this shows that the book was originally written in Hebrew. (Our Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts. Rev. by A.W. Adams. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1958. 83.) That Sirach was originally written in Hebrew may be of some significance for the biblical canon. The book was accepted into the canon of the Old Testament by Catholicism and Eastern Orthdoxy but not by Judaism or Protestantism. (Palestinian Jews apparently determined the final form of the Jewish scriptures at the rabbinic university at Jamnia [or "Javneh"] c. AD 100. See "Council of Jamnia.") Since Talmudic references to Jamnia suggest that at least some decisions about which books to include in the Bible were based on language (e.g., to be inspired a book must have been written in Hebrew), perhaps Sirach was rejected because no Hebrew manuscripts of it were known at Jamnia at that time.
The non-literary materials, which include court documents, legal writings and the correspondence of the local Jewish community, 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."
Goitein remarks that the number of documents dropped in number about 1266, and saw a rise around 1500 when the local community was increased by refugees from Spain. The geniza remained in use until it was emptied by Western scholars eager for its material.
[edit] See also
- Dead Sea Scrolls
- Elephantine papyri
- Jewish temple at Elephantine
- Land of Onias
- Philo
- Philo's Works
- Pseudo-Philo
- Moses in rabbinic literature
- Letter of the Karaite elders of Ascalon
[edit] References
- A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, by Shelomo Dov Goitein (6 volumes)
