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The Cairo Geniza is an accumulation of Jewish manuscripts written from about 870 to as late as 1880 CE, that were found in the genizah of the synagogue of Fostat (Old Cairo), Egypt (built 882), the Basatin cemetery east of Old Cairo, and a number of old documents that were bought in Cairo in the later 19th century that are now 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.
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 Shelomo Dov 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 Jews who wrote the materials in the geniza were familiar with the culture and language of their contemporary society. Many of these documents were written in the Arabic language using the Hebrew alphabet. The documents are invaluable as evidence alone for how colloquial Arabic of this period was spoken and understood alone. 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 light this material casts on the period of the Fatimid and Ayyubid rulers extends beyond the world of their authors.
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. 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." To put this in prespective, Jacob Lassner estimated that all of the Arabic papyri and other writing found in Egypt number less than 100,000.
Creation of the contents
The normal practice for Middle Eastern genizas was to periodically remove the contents and bury them in a cemetery; as a result, few genizas explored in the years following the discovery of the Cairo Geniza produced anything of interest. However, the materials deposited in the Cairo geniza, beginning with the remodelling of the Fustat synagogue (about 1025 CE), were preserved by the hot, dry climate; the geniza was located in the attic of the building. Accessible only through a hole in the wall, easy access was discouraged. Possibly because of fear that Jewish funeral processions would be attacked, the contents were left untouched until the 19th century when Western scholars became interested in the contents.
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, and remained in use until the contents were finally emptied by Western scholars eager for the material.
Modern discovery
The earliest description of this geniza was in 1864 by Jacob Saphir, a scholar from Jerusalem, in his book Iben Safir, who was unable to examine the contents. A number of documents from this source were sold by antique dealers in Cairo over the next decades, but the materials only began to be removed in volume in the 1890s, when the building was being rennovated. Different western scholars visited the genizah to mine its contents, and present their discoveries to the Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library in Petersburg, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Dropsie College in Philadelphia, the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and other major repositories. However, the collection stored at the Municipal Library in Frankfurt am Main was destroyed during the Second World War, without any description of what it held.
Some of the Geniza's contents had already made their way to private collections or libraries — mostly via scholarly visitors or Middle Eastern antique markets. Although a sizeable collection of papers purchased by Solomon A. Wertheimer from the Cairo Geniza had arrived at the Cambridge University Library, Solomon Schechter, reader in rabbinics at the university, initially had such little regard for these materials that he forwarded the collection unopened to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. However, Schechter changed his opinion when in 1896 two Scottish sisters, Mrs. Lewis and Mrs. Gibson, showed him some leaves from the geniza that contained the Hebrew text of Ecclesiasticus, which had for centuries only been known in Greek and Latin translation. (Other such finds were the first copies of The Damascus Document known in modern times, one of the more important texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls.) He quickly found support for an expedition to the Cairo Geniza, and carefully selected for the University Library a trove three times the size of any other collection.
Another cache of related material was literally unearthed about a decade later in the Basatin Cemetery, and openly sold. Some of this material is believed to form the collection housed at the Freer Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.. A systematic search of this cemetery by French scholars in 1912 and 1913 resulted in the creation of the Mosseri Collection.
Modern scholarship
Adalbert Merx made the first scientific (and Goitein sadly notes "one of the best") publication of the geniza documents in his 1894 Documents de paleographie hebraique. Schechter intended to systematicly publish the corpus, but his duties as President of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America prevented what little work that he accomplished—three volumes of selected literary texts—from being published until after his death. Jacob Mann published in 1920 the fruits of his study of the Cambridge and other British collections, "The Jews in Egypt and in Palestine under the Fatimid Caliphs," a work Goitein states "will remain a classic as long as the Geniza is studied."
The publication of the materials of the Cairo Geniza is as scattered as its contents. Goitein notes that a selection of texts was published in the Boston magazine The Green Bag: An Entertaining Magazine of Lawyers, and only rediscovered, by accident, decades later. Goitein laments the lack of organization in the collections. Even when such helps were available, he complained that they were not as informative or complete to make a difference.
Goitein's name appears frequently in this article because he devoted decades of study to these materials to assemble his authoritative account of the social and economic history of the Jews in this period. It is a work that compares in scope and detail to Ferdinand Braudel's The Mediterranean in the Time of Philip II.
Goitein's work is not the final word on the subject; study continues. One recent scholar is Gideon Lisbon, who has used this material in his research on the status of women in the Islamic society of this period. Another is Geoffrey Khan, who has studied the legal documents from this Geniza written in Arabic, and published some of his findings in his Arabic Legal and Administrative Documents in the Cambridge Genizah Collection (Cambridge, 1993 ISBN 0521451698).
The cataloging and description of these materials continue. Cambridge University's Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit has made some of these available online.
See also
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)
External links
- Princeton Geniza Project Website
- A Window into Jewish Medieval Life
- University of Cambridge Taylor-Shechter Geniza Research Unit
"Cairo Geniza"