Text Treasures: Cairo Geniza
300,000 documents found in an attic storeroom
The Cairo Geniza refers to the cache of about 300,000 documents found in the attic storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue, located in Fustat (in Old Cairo), the capital city of Egypt during the seventh–tenth centuries C.E. The creation and preservation of the Cairo Geniza owes to the long-lived Jewish habit of consigning disused texts in Hebrew script to a slow decay in dignified limbo, safe from profanation, rather than casually destroying them through dumping. Not a curated collection or archive arranged for storage and retrieval, the Cairo Geniza is thus an accidental mass of dead writings piled up much like archaeological strata. The Hebrew word geniza signifies “hiding place.”
The storeroom—accessible only by ladder from the women’s balcony of the synagogue—was never really forgotten, so we are perhaps unjustified in talking about its discovery. Starting in the 1880s, however, scholars from Jerusalem, England, and elsewhere learned of the existence of the documents and thus began to empty the storeroom of some of its contents. Among the early visitors were the Scottish twin sisters Agnes Smith Lewis and Margaret Dunlop Gibson, who upon their return to Cambridge, in 1896, showed their documents to the great scholar of Jewish studies, Solomon Schechter. The documents included a page of the Hebrew original of the book of Ben Sira and inspired Schechter to travel to Cairo. With permission of the rabbi of the synagogue, Refael Aharon Ben-Shimon, himself an important scholar, Schechter was able to remove the remaining contents of the Cairo Geniza.a
Built between 1025 and 1041, the Ben Ezra Synagogue served the local community for more than 900 years—thus explaining the enormous volume of accumulated writings—until it was decommissioned during the 1960s. The survival of the documents owes to the fortunate confluence of multiple factors, including favorable climate with stable humidity levels; the omnipresent dust from local limestone containing high levels of calcium carbonate, which naturally aids the preservation of paper, parchment, and ink; and the fact that the storeroom was apparently large enough that it never needed to be emptied.
The text treasures of the Cairo Geniza cover more than a millennium of history. While the latest documents date from the 19th century, the earliest recovered writings predate the founding of the synagogue by centuries. This is due to the practice of repurposing old documents (often as palimpsests) and because sturdy parchment Torah scrolls may be used for centuries and, in the present instance, clearly were transferred from an older synagogue to the then newly built Ben Ezra. Dating as far back as the fifth or sixth century, the earliest writings in the geniza survived because they were reused as scrap paper to record new texts.
From BIBLICAL ARCHAEOLOGY SOCIETY, here.