The Ben Ezra Synagogue and the Cairo Geniza

Jewish practice holds that writing which may contain the name of God cannot be destroyed. Worn-out texts go into a geniza, a storeroom, until they can be buried.

Most communities emptied theirs periodically. The congregation at Ben Ezra in Fustat, old Cairo, did not, for something close to a thousand years.

Two things made the result extraordinary. First, the sheer duration. Second, that these Jews wrote Arabic in Hebrew characters, which meant the prohibition captured far more than liturgy. Into the chamber went business contracts, rabbinical court records, marriage settlements and divorce deeds, letters from merchants trading to India, petitions to officials, children's writing exercises, prescriptions, poems, accounts, and private correspondence that its writers would have been appalled to know survived.

The chamber had neither door nor window and was entered by ladder through a hole in the wall. It held on the order of 400,000 fragments.

The removal

In 1896 the Scottish twin scholars Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson returned from Egypt with fragments and showed them to Solomon Schechter at Cambridge, who identified one as Hebrew text of Ben Sira, a book known until then only in translation, and grasped what the chamber must contain.

Schechter travelled to Cairo, obtained the community's permission, and removed the greater part of the contents.

The Taylor-Schechter collection at Cambridge holds nearly 193,000 fragments. Others went to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, the Bodleian, the John Rylands Library in Manchester, and elsewhere, so that the two halves of a single letter can sit on separate continents, a problem it has taken a century, and latterly large-scale digitisation, to work around.

The removal is regarded less comfortably now than it was then. The documents belonged to a living community, which gave its consent, but did so to an eminent foreign scholar with institutional backing in circumstances where the terms were not really open to negotiation. None of it has gone back.

What it changed

S. D. Goitein spent decades on the documentary material and published A Mediterranean Society in six volumes between 1967 and 1993. It reconstructed, from these scraps, the ordinary life of a Jewish population inside a medieval Muslim world: how they made a living, what they owned, whom they married, how they fell out, how far they travelled, what they worried about.

That is not the usual raw material for medieval history, which mostly survives as the records of rulers and institutions. The Geniza gave a documented social history of ordinary people across the medieval Mediterranean, and it remains the single richest source for Jewish-Muslim life in that world, including how routine and unremarkable much of the interaction was.

Two Englishwomen buying old paper in a Cairo market set off a discovery that reshaped how medieval Jewish history could be studied.

Fragments that reached Cambridge

In the 1890s, twin scholars Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson acquired manuscript fragments in Cairo and brought samples back to Cambridge, where the scholar Solomon Schechter recognised their significance and travelled to Fustat himself in 1896, eventually transporting the bulk of the Ben Ezra Synagogue's geniza, a store-room where worn documents bearing God's name were kept rather than discarded, to Cambridge University Library for study.

What ten centuries of paper contained

Because Jewish practice generally forbids destroying writings that include divine names, the geniza had accumulated not only religious texts but centuries of everyday material, letters, contracts, marriage documents and business records, giving historians an unusually direct window into the ordinary life of medieval Jewish communities across the Mediterranean and Middle East rather than only their formal religious literature.

A famous name among the fragments

Among the hundreds of thousands of fragments recovered were documents in the handwriting of the philosopher and physician Maimonides, who lived and worked in Fustat in the twelfth century, giving scholars direct manuscript evidence connected to one of medieval Judaism's most significant thinkers rather than only later copies of his work.