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"Cairo Genizah."
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Lost archive : traces of a caliphate in a Cairo synagogue
\"The lost archive of the Fatimid caliphate (909-1171) survived in an unexpected place: the storage room, or geniza, of a synagogue in Cairo, recycled as scrap paper and deposited there by medieval Jews. Marina Rustow tells the story of this extraordinary find, inviting us to reconsider the longstanding but mistaken consensus that before 1500 the dynasties of the Islamic Middle East produced few documents, and preserved even fewer. Beginning with government documents before the Fatimids and paper's westward spread across Asia, Rustow reveals a millennial tradition of state record keeping whose very continuities suggest the strength of Middle Eastern institutions, not their weakness. Tracing the complex routes by which Arabic documents made their way from Fatimid palace officials to Jewish scribes, the book provides a rare window onto a robust culture of documentation and archiving not only comparable to that of medieval Europe, but, in many cases, surpassing it. Above all, Rustow argues that the problem of archives in the medieval Middle East lies not with the region's administrative culture, but with our failure to understand preindustrial documentary ecology. Illustrated with stunning examples from the Cairo Geniza, this compelling book advances our understanding of documents as physical artifacts, showing how the records of the Fatimid caliphate, once recovered, deciphered, and studied, can help change our thinking about the medieval Islamicate world and about premodern polities more broadly.\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
On Editing Medical Fragments from the Cairo Geniza
A reliable edition of medical fragments in Hebrew and/or Arabic script from the Cairo Geniza, especially those dealing with pharmacology, can only be accomplished if the editors are trained in medieval Judeo-Arabic, Arabic philology, and paleography and have a thorough knowledge of all the secondary sources and studies. Allowing too many faulty readings otherwise, editions of these fragments cannot be considered credible.
Journal Article
Sacred trash : the lost and found world of the Cairo Geniza
Traces the efforts of two women scholars who recovered what has become the most vital cache of Hebrew manuscripts ever discovered, in an account that explains what the findings reveal about Mediterranean Judaism.
Book
Shared Memory and History: The Abrahamic Legacy in Medieval Judaeo-Arabic Poetry from the Cairo Genizah
The Cairo Genizah collections provide scholars with a profound insight into Jewish culture, history, and the deeply intertwined relationships between Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Among these treasures are often overlooked Arabic poetic fragments from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries, which illuminate the shared Abrahamic legacy. This paper explores mainly two unpublished poetic fragments written in Judaeo-Arabic (Arabic in Hebrew script), analyzing how they reflect a shared Jewish–Muslim cultural memory and history, particularly through the reverence for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and other key figures central to both traditions across the medieval Mediterranean and Middle East. By situating these poetic voices within broader historical and cultural contexts, this study underscores the role of poetry in reflecting sociocultural and historical dimensions while fostering cross-cultural and religious coexistence. It demonstrates how poetry acts as a bridge between religion, history, and culture by revealing the shared Abrahamic heritage of Jews and Muslims within two Arabic poetic fragments from the Cairo Genizah.
Journal Article
Rav Hai Gaon’s Jurisprudential Monograph Kitāb Adab al-Qaḍā: A Reconstructed Text from the Cairo Genizah
This essay presents the discovery of a previously almost entirely unknown treatise written in Judeo-Arabic by Rav Hai b. Sherira Gaon. This monograph, a manual for judges, is a Jewish instantiation of the well-established Muslim genre
Adab al-Qāḍī
(Duties of Judges). To date, only several indirect remnants translated into medieval Hebrew have been identified as part of this work; however, large parts of the skeleton of this halakhic monograph can be reconstructed from Genizah fragments. Not only is this work of immense importance with respect to judicial issues, but it also promises to elucidate aspects of halakhic literature written in Judeo-Arabic generally. After presenting the historical-philological thinking that led to this discovery, this article considers the text’s importance and the social-literary circumstances that led to its development within its Islamic context. The Islamic and Jewish texts of the genre lead to the adoption of a more detailed model of the mutual shared legal relationships between Jews and Muslims in medieval Babylonia and yield what may be viewed as a more complicated and nuanced approach to the monotheistic-Abrahamic triangle.
Journal Article
An Aggressive Magical Figurine from Caesarea
A small lead figurine from an Early Roman-period burial complex in Caesarea displays telltale signs of its use as an aggressive magical figurine. It presents a naked woman whose legs are broken above the knees and whose arms are twisted behind her back. Many similar figurines have been found throughout the Greco-Roman world, and their use is amply documented in Greek magical recipe books and Greek and Latin literary texts that describe or condemn magical practices. In the Jewish world, the use of such figurines seems to have been much less common. In addition to publishing the Caesarea figurine and placing it in its historical context, we offer an English translation of and brief comments on the only two Late-Antique Jewish magical recipes with instructions for producing such figurines that are currently known.
Journal Article
Searching for the Last Genizah Fragment in Late Ottoman Cairo: A Material Survey of Egyptian Jewish Literary Culture
The Cairo Genizah is well known as a repository for hundreds of thousands of manuscripts that the Jewish residents of Fustat (Old Cairo) produced and consumed in the premodern period. Foreign “collectors” acquired most of these manuscripts for European libraries in the second half of the nineteenth century, with the majority arriving at the Cambridge University Library in 1897 under the auspices of Solomon Schechter. Less well known is the fact that hundreds of Genizah fragments were produced in the late nineteenth century, even as European collectors were scouring Cairo for ancient texts. This later corpus includes witnesses to the social and economic history of late Ottoman Cairo and provides copious evidence for the material history of Egyptian Jewish literary activity at that time. Despite this, it remains understudied for both Ottoman and Jewish history. Late Genizah material also raises questions about the integrity of “Cairo Genizah” manuscript collections around the world, as some fragments postdate Schechter's Genizah “discovery,” and others were never in Egypt at all.
Journal Article
The Cairo Genizah Fragment of the Visions of Levi from the University of Manchester Library
Abstract
Although the Visions of Levi (so-called Aramaic Levi Document) is a Jewish priestly composition written in the second or third century BCE, the largest part of its text comes from the trove of Jewish medieval manuscripts found in the Genizah of the Ezra synagogue in Old Cairo. Among the Genizah scrolls housed at the University of Manchester Library, Gideon Bohak found a new fragment (P 1185) of the pseudepigraphic document dedicated to Levi and his life. The present study contains a new edition of P 1185, including its paleographic description, notes on the readings, comments and photographs of the manuscript.
Journal Article
Finding a Fragment in a Pile of Geniza
This essay offers a practical guide to the major collections and editions of Geniza documents as well as to some of the resources available for their study.
Journal Article
The Noahide Commandments in the Jerusalem Talmud from a Cairo Geniza Fragment
Numerous quotations by medieval scholars from tractate ‘Avodah Zarah of the Jerusalem Talmud are not to be found in extant texts. This has led some scholars to suggest that a long passage, probably dealing with the Noahide commandments, is missing from our extant editions. Other scholars have argued that this was not an original passage in the Jerusalem Talmud but rather a later addition known to these medieval scholars. This article presents for the first time a direct textual witness of this passage from the Cairo Geniza. This new finding raises the need to reexamine the question of the provenance of this passage.
Journal Article